What good does it do for AAPL's business focus to sit on cash for years? The management paralysis is only made more obvious by the cash hoard. Even their existing products (pro desktop) they let languish.
If you don't have the imagination and need a past example, consider the success of AWS. The project was born out of Bezo's edict early on in the creation of Amazon that everything the company does internally must be able to be turned into a service. Almost every analyst in 2006 was against the idea, it was not at all a business focus at the time and Bezos himself admitted it would not be a forseeable revenue stream:
> Stifel Nicolaus & Co. (SF ) analyst Scott W. Devitt notes: "There's not going to be any economic return from any of these projects for the foreseeable future." Bezos himself admits as much. ... "We think it's going to be a very meaningful business for us one day," he says. "What we've historically seen is that the seeds we plant can take anywhere from three, five, seven years."
Plenty of people call AWS obvious now, and it's easy to fall into that mindset. It's worth remembering that almost everyone back then thought it was a big folly. Why burn the cash making AWS? What's the business focus?
In 2011(or 2010?) AWS revenue was still listed in the "Other" column on their 10K, even though it was by then their #1 area of growth. Now? It's a sea of pure profit.
The scale of the success surprised even Bezos, but he had enough imagination to take real risks anyway.
What's the difference between a hobby, a folly, and the future?
Apple has run itself as a functional org as opposed to a divisional org and regards that as a key differentiating factor that provides it sustainable competitive advantage.
But one of the key constraints of functional orgs is that they require incredible focus and discipline or the entire structure breaks down. Apple doesn't have iPhone marketing and iPad marketing that report to the boss of iPhone and iPad respectively, they just have Apple marketing that is in charge of making Apple better and reports to the boss of Apple.
That's a huge reason why they were able to self-cannibalize their most successful product so ruthlessly. Because there was no iPod boss who's bonus depended on iPod sales and would throw grit in the wheels of any rival projects. But you can only do this when every single employee is able to hold the entire corporate business model in their head.
You think Apple would do better under a more divisional structure. That's fine, the pros and cons of functional vs divisional have been debated for ages. But it's also a moot point because Apple is never going to switch to a divisional structure and without switching to one, they can't do all the things you want them to do.
In the case of Apple not branching out more quickly, I'd say they're doing it to protect their brand image. For better or for worse, that's probably their strongest asset.
That’s not a failure of imagination - that’s business focus.