Is Amazon the New Apple?

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Will Apple topple from its perch as the world’s most valuable company? The stock market didn’t reflect Apple’s declining smartphone sales far enough ahead, which led to a drop in share price when year-over-year Q1 iPhone sales declined nearly 15%. And while the overall market grew about 4%, leader Samsung stayed flat, and a handful of Chinese companies rose ominously. Apple’s reliance on the iPhone for growth has become a weakness.

But there is another important consequence. If you look at total market capitalization (total shares times share price), Apple is declining rapidly and Amazon is rising rapidly. For the last 3 calendar quarters, the top 5 companies in the world have included only Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and Exxon Mobil, and the top 3 were only Apple, Alphabet, and Microsoft. But Apple’s market cap(italization) in 1Q2015 was more than double ANY other company, while in 1Q2016 there were 7 other companies with market caps over half of Apple’s. But In 1Q2015 Amazon was not in the top 10. It was #10 in 3Q2015, and #4 in 1Q2016 (getting profitable helped a lot). And Amazon is not dependent on one product line.

Ads Based on Recent Shopping Miss Their Target

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I was shopping for MEN’s pickpocket-proof travel pants, and I must have visited travelsmith.com in my search. That was on Monday, May 2. Now, on Wednesday, May 4, EVERY site I visit—on searches totally unrelated to clothing—I am dealt a Travelsmith WOMAN’S Walkabout Knit Short-Sleeved Drape-Neck Top. I hope that Travelsmith is not paying Google (I am using Chrome) or another ad-dealing company very much for these ads. What is their logic? Do they think that I want to buy my wife this top (admittedly, at $27 it IS a lot cheaper than the pants)? Fortunately, after repeating this advertisement ad nauseum, Google graciously offered to let me fine-tune my ad preferences. Hmmm.

But there must be millions of other victims of these faulty algorithms. And some folks, such as the Wall Street Journal’s satirist Joe Queenan, are even more outspoken (e.g., in his ridicule of Amazon, Expedia, and Netflix).