If it's not obvious, Steve's quote is ENTIRELY about capex ROI, and I feel his quote is more relevant to what is happening today than anything Arvind Krishna is imagining. The quote is posted in my comment not to grandstand Apple in any sense, but to grandstand just how consistently wrong IBM has been about so many opportunities that they have failed to read correctly - reprography, mini computers and microcomputers being just three.

Yes it is about ROI: "IBM enters the personal computer market in November ’81 with the IBM PC. 1983 Apple and IBM emerged as the industry’s strongest competitors each selling approximately one billion dollars worth of personal computers in 1983, each will invest greater than fifty million dollars for R&D and another fifty million dollars for television advertising in 1984 totaling almost one quarter of a billion dollars combined, the shakeout is in full swing. The first major firm goes bankrupt with others teetering on the brink, total industry losses for 83 out shadow even the combined profits of Apple and IBM for personal computers."

I have no horse in this race.

I don’t think this is really a fair assessment. IBM is in fact a huge company today and it is possible that they are because they took the conservative approach in some of their acquisition strategy.

It is a bit like watching someone play poker and fold and then it turns out they had the high hand after all. In hindsight you could of course know that the risk would have been worth it but at the moment perhaps it did not seem like it given the money the first player would be risking.

A big difference is that in the past things like the potential of the PC were somewhat widely underestimated. And then the internet was again as well.

But in modern times it's rather the opposite scenario. The average entity is diving head first into AI simply expecting a revolutionary jump in capability that a more 'informed', for lack of any less snooty term, perspective would suggest is quite unlikely to occur anytime in the foreseeable future. Basically we have a modern day gold rush where companies and taking out unbelievably massive loans to invest in shovels.

The only way this doesn't catastrophically blow up is if AI companies manage to convince the government they're too big to fail, and get the Boeing, Banks, et al treatment. And I expect that's exactly the current strategy, but that's rather a high risk, low reward, type strategy.

I have no special knowledge about IBM Vs Apple historically, but: a quarter billion in CAPEX when you've earned a billion in revenue in a single year is extremely different to what we're seeing now. These companies are spending all of their free cash flow, then taking on debt, to the tune of percentage points of world GDP, and multiples of any revenue they've seen so far. That kind of oversupply is a sure fire way to kill any ROI.