Greek Complexity

Twits

Or perhaps worse.

After a few consecutive 12-15 hour work-days, I needed to do something mindless when I got home last night. What better way to do this than to get on Twitter (hah!).

I took a quick glance through my feed and then, out of curiosity, clicked through to check who was following me. Now I have a list of just 43 followers, puny by most measures, but more than I ever expected to have when I first created my account. Many are people I know personally, a few seem to have found me because of stuff I've said, but there are a number of followers who just seem to be... twits. I wonder if they're even real users or just robots, possibly created by Twitter itself. They come in a few varieties. Take a look:

The Sleeper

This is one of my followers:

Now, maybe I'm being a little uncharitable here. Just because I don't know who this person is and just because this person hasn't tweeted at all, doesn't mean she's a robot. There are others on my list who I do know personally and they haven't tweeted much either. However, my point here is that simply looking at how many "users" Twitter has doesn't tell the whole story. Moving on...

Apple: I was wrong

...on current evidence. Six months ago, I called a top on Apple. Since then, the stock price has continue to rise, briefly making it the world's largest publicly listed company by market capitalisation last week. Cue many excited articles. I can't be bothered to link any more. There were also more sensible articles from Paid Content (which contains the hilarious quote: "Microsoft is finally taking mobile seriously but its legal department has had more success than its product development people") and the WSJ among others telling us why such comparisons are, apart from their entertainment value, pointless and stupid.

More important than the symbolism of becoming the world's most valuable company -- note that they were helped by a 14% fall in Exxon Mobil's share price -- is the fact that Apple's stock price rose 4% over the same period, going bang against my prediction.

However, what does all of this mean for the future? Will Apple continue to generate outstanding returns for its shareholders? I remain cynical, but maybe that's just bias. There is the problem of being so big: how do you grow even bigger at the same pace as historically? Lex is doubtful, but perhaps not as much as me. Aswath Damodaran was optimistic as of January. Time will tell. Let's check back in six more months.

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The idea of checking back in six months reminds me of this funny Ellen Degeneres quote I once came across, which you are welcome to use to make fun of me:

The good psychic would pick up the phone before it rang. Of course it is possible there was no one on the other line. Once she said "God Bless you." I said, "I didn't sneeze." She looked deep into my eyes and said, "You will, eventually." And damn it if she wasn't right. Two days later I sneezed.

The VC hears the entrepreneur's lament

...and responds: Mukund Mohan does a nice follow-up to his article the other day here. I covered a few of his points in my own post.