A Past Time of Uncertainty for Apple

It looks like Apple is set to have another rough day today as the Wall Street Journal reported that the company has cut orders for iPhone components on weak sales.  Apple shareholders are rightly worried, but perhaps can take some solace in another time that investors were skeptical and the company ended up prevailing:

It's easy to forget that for almost a year after the iPhone was initially released it actually looked like Blackberry would dominate the mobile phone market.  Recall that the original iPhone didn't have any third party apps, and the app store didn't open until a year after the first iPhone was released.  During this pre-app period there were real concerns that consumers wouldn't adopt a touch screen and that functions like BBM would draw consumers to Blackberries.  In the year after iPhone's release RIMM outperformed AAPL by as much as 75%.  Once the app store was launched all of that changed though and over time of course the iPhone became dominant.

All this is not to say that Apple shareholders are in the clear, but at least to point out that there has been skepticism about the company's operational abilities before and everything turned out alright.

AAPL vs. RIMM Performance From iPhone's 2007 Release to App Store Launch in 2008