Suggestions for an Apple Shopping List – NYTimes.com.

Steve Jobe, Apple’s late CEO

Apples’s has accumulated huge amounts of cash during these years so has most tech. companies and in order to stay competitive they need to find investments to grow as opposed to just to rely on organic growth. I would definitely investing in Cloud Technology and infrastructure and even offering internet services like Google with its fiver optics high speed cables which was recently offered by them to a small area in the US. But then again having so much cash might push a company to invest in ultimately failed companies like Microsoft’s recent writedown of a company bought for 6 billion USD. 

That’s the challenge facing Tim Cook, Apple’s chief, whose company’s cash hoard keeps growing — by about $1 billion a week.
He could hold onto it. He could increase Apple’s dividend, which he instituted this year for the first time.
Or he could spend it.
Just last week, Mr. Cook acquired AuthenTec, a mobile security company, for $356 million in cash — a price equal to pocket lint for a company with the war chest the size of Apple’s.
The real question is whether Mr. Cook would ever spend Apple’s money on an “elephant” — Wall Street parlance for a huge deal.
Apple denizens often say that the company is not interested in deal making. It has, after all, invented some of today’s most successful consumer products. But that view misunderstands Apple’s history: some of its most important innovations were not invented within Apple; they were purchased from other companies.
For example, the touch-sensitive gesture technology that made the iPhone and iPadpossible was invented and patented by FingerWorks, which Apple acquired in 2005. Siri? Apple bought it in 2010. Even Apple’s current Macintosh operating system was an acquisition of sorts. It is built on the back of NeXT, acquired from Steve Jobs (they got him to return as part of the deal, too) in 1996. (Pixar, Mr. Jobs’s other big success, was an acquisition as well. He bought the company from George Lucas as part of a spinoff from Lucasfilm in 1986.)

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