...

And the increase in stock price was solely thanks to Bill and not other products like ipod????

Yup. For the better part of the past 10 years AAPL stock has been in the proverbial dumpster. Even the big, (bursted) tech bubble of 2000 didn't elevate stock value half as much as Apple's recent iPod success. They're kicking butt now. Lucky for them their short liason with Microsoft didn't kill them.

Ah, we are in agreement. Someone else was giving Bill credit for Apple's success. I pointed out that the ipod and other non-Bill Apple products had a bunch to do with it. Perhaps I misunderstood your "Yup" and stock lesson as a disagreement. When in fact it merely proves my point.

On Nov 4, 2006, at 11:14 AM, Xiaofeng Zhao wrote:

...

...

Yup. For the better part of the past 10 years AAPL stock has been in the proverbial dumpster. Even the big, (bursted) tech bubble of 2000 didn't elevate stock value half as much as Apple's recent iPod success. They're kicking butt now. Lucky for them their short liason with Microsoft didn't kill them.

This actually shows ignorance. Apple came out with OS X on March 24, 2001 which was .. umm .. 5.8 years ago and it took a bit for it to grow. They then released the iPod which had a halo effect and caused those iPod users to take a look at Apple's other products and if you look at the charts these bozos produce who watch this stuff .. it's been a straight climb since. It's quite the same when talking about Linux .. which was released HOW long ago and and took HOW long to catch on? The whole paragraph above is quite silly .. even the part about Microsoft .. for Microsoft basically paid Apple to make IE it's default browser for a few years .. which gave them time to get Safari out the door. I quite think this is the case with Novell. They probably see how badly Vista is going to do with all this DRM crap that it's ladened with and the restrictions it puts on the user. This release of Windows is going to piss a lot of people off and shove them toward Linux and OS X .. plain and simple. One never really knows what the thinking is behind what these big corp's do .. I'm not saying that Novell's CEO is anywhere near as savvy as Jobs is .. but he might be. We simply don't know. My 0.2 cents. -Ben -- Envy, n: Wishing you'd been born with an unfair advantage instead of having to try and acquire one.