Ode til Helsedirektoratet

Winning

The splendid gentlemen of OK Go have yet again shown that they are the definitive Masters of the Internet.

This is obviously the peak of civilization thus far; it’s up to the rest of us to disprove the notion that all will be Roman-style downhill decadence from now till eternity.

Apple and the giant pile of cash

Apple currently has $98 billion of cash stuffed in its accounts. Cries for dividend payments have increased in volume as the pile of money has grown to increasingly absurd heights — the company’s last dividend payment took place on December 15th 1995.

Plenty has been written about the familiarly quiet stance of Apple’s leadership and the absurdities within reach for those on a shopping spree with $100 billion to burn. No wonder few stories focus on what Apple actually ought to do; Apple’s success is a classic tale of the underdog winning it all, idealistic artists defeating cynicism — beauty and truth really was more important than search engine optimization and CRM software.

With this perspective, who cares about corporate finance?

The purpose of it all
Companies have the privilege of playing around with their investors’ money because we expect them to do better than we could. Give Sir Jony Ive some capital and a top-secret lab and his team will change the world. Trust Tim Cook with your credit card and Apple’s supply chain management and all will be well. This is the simple side of cash. Just as in all other areas of life, it is better do something productive, interesting and profitable than letting it all slumber away.

There’s another, more subtle side: as a company holds more cash, employees can go to bed without worrying about the impermanence of their paychecks. There are millions of valuable ideas and relationships floating around in the company, and given a bit of a buffer these won’t disappear just because Apple had a rough quarter. This element of insurance has been the justification for Apple’s hoarding.

The pitfalls
Could there ever be too much of a good thing? Can Apple hold too much cash? The answer is of course yes, and the reasons relatively simple, though undercommunicated.

Firstly, as is evident on paydays in bars around the world, people with too much money have a tendency to do surprisingly stupid things. Relationships, windows and insurance policies are broken — humans are impatient and irrational beings. Running around with $100 billion in your pocket is a risky business. Even the calm, cool and collected have terrible ideas and awkward moments.

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs details the litigation against Android, an enlightening example. Steve Jobs declared that he was willing to burn all of Apple’s cash to see justice done. This shows an admirable fighting spirit, but it might have become a terrible waste of shareholder money. Getting your competitors to behave decently certainly has a value, but how much is it really worth? $5 billion? $20 billion? There are plenty of arenas where being right is more important than being frugal. With tens of billion shareholder dollars are at stake, this was an arena for cool rationality.

Secondly, insurance is only worthwhile up to a certain point. Apple has enough cash to cover its operating expenses for a decade or so. Should Samsung finally figure out how to tune its Xerox machines to such a perfection that all Apple sales stopped tomorrow, there’d still be enough money to keep the lights on in Cupertino into the 2020s.

Apple should definitely hold enough cash to sleep well through rough markets, supplier problems or a lacklustre product launch. But how many failed products should we accept? How many chances does a publicly held corporation deserve?

A light that never goes out
During the worst slump in the mid 90s, Apple lost money for two years. With a full decade of operating expenses covered by its current cash position, even extremely disappointing sales should keep it afloat for at least two decades. Two decades without a single hit product?

I can’t see how the talent and momentum at Apple could create such a disastrous state of affairs. Decades of non-performance is utter and complete failure, not bad luck best left to insurance. It’s time to share the spoils.

Epitaphs of the war

Two of my favourite things are war poetry and the web. Alas, I have rarely found combinations of the two all that appealing — most sites are ruined by intrusive ads or dreadful design, others are encyclopaedic in scope with terrifying typography.

German war graves, Südfriedhof, Cologne

This being the 11th of November 2011, conditions like these are not worth living in. Hoping to improve on this depressing state of affairs, I’ve made Their Name Liveth, a curated collection of war poetry. There isn’t much to see yet, but I plan to update it every Sunday or so.

My tour diary

I originally switched to the Mac platform back in the days of the 12″ PowerBook. A solid construction, yet light enough to carry everywhere, large enough for a full-sized keyboard, yet small enough to work with in any airline seat; truly a machine deserving its legendary status. Utility and beauty at its purest, I’ve been enthralled by Macs ever since.

I got every possible bit of utility out of that little machine and kept it well beyond its best before date, but I finally had to replace it a few years back. I never quite settled with the portability of the 13″ and never got fully comfortable with the iPad as my only computer for more than a couple of days; I can’t imagine going back to a life without the iPad, but my computing needs are just too darned heavy.

After thinking it over for quite a while, I stumbled out through the autumn winds today and got just about the nicest 11″ MacBook Air available. This thing is impossibly thin, absurdly fast and weighs next to nothing. No beachballs, no waiting, no loading – nothing. It’s just there, ready for action, anywhere, any time, giving me no reasons at all not to make the best stuff I can. Bring it on.