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AppleAs usual, the Apple Keynote, which introduced updates to watchOS, macOS, iOS, and tvOS was done with great marketing aplomb. Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them works every time. Apple has it down pat. Dan Frommer over at Quartz, believes that Apple Keynotes, made not of aluminum and glass, but rather of words and pictures, are “among Apple’s most successful products”.

Also as usual, many financial analysts are missing the point of the Apple platforms. They seem to be focused on whether the profit margin next week will be 38.1% or 38.6%. Nothing can go straight up to the moon–as we learned from Sun, Cisco, Microsoft, and many others–but Apple still has a long way up, in my opinion. The reason is not the profit margin, although surely they will remain quite profitable. The point is they make their products easy to use, cherished by users, and they provide great customer support. Whenever I have an occasion to talk to Apple customer support, I get the feeling they really cared about my questions. One time a support rep did not know the answer to my question, and they immediately asked if I would mind if they got a colleague with more experience on the particular question to take over the call. Can you even imagine an AT&T or Comcast support rep doing that?

The point about ease of use is profound. The financial analysts don’t seem to get the seamless integration that Apple offers. You take a picture with your iPhone and then you pick up your iPad to look at it. Or you visit iCloud.com to look at it. Or on your Mac. Or your friend or family member can look at it in the Photo Stream you have shared with them in iCloud. You can text a friend from your iPhone and then when you get back home to your Mac, you can continue the dialog from the desktop or on your iPad. None of these things requires knowing much. As Steve Jobs used to say, “it just works”. Yesterday’s keynote took these concepts to a much higher level. Consumers will clamor for the new platform updates. They will also add to their collection of Apple devices. Large numbers of people will have an iPhone, an iPad, a Mac, an Apple Watch, and an Apple TV. It is an ecosystem which will scale to hundreds of billions of dollars.

Again, no company can grow to the moon, but it is quite conceivable to me, based on this latest set of announcements, that Apple will be the first company to achieve a market capitalization of one trillion dollars.