By Tim Worstall, Contributor According to the standard rules of thumb used by the British financial press the problems that Apple is having over its new headquarters building should spell trouble, possibly even doom, for the firm. There are many different formulations of the basic principle but this story from Businessweek would make many commenters reach for their version of it: He had that right. Since 2011, the budget for Apple’s Campus 2 has ballooned from less than $3 billion to nearly $5 billion, according to five people close to the project who were not authorized to speak on the record. If their consensus estimate is accurate, Apple’s expansion would eclipse the $3.9 billion being spent on the new World Trade Center complex in New York, and the new office space would run more than $1,500 per square foot—three times the cost of many top-of-the-line downtown corporate towers. Compared to Apple’s profits or cash reserves of course this number is very small. But it is indeed standard in the UK financial press to make comments about firms that move into new buildings. For example, Don Sull at the London Bsiness School has always used the presence of fountains in reception as a signal to sell. If they’re spending money on that then where else are they wasting cash? Other formulations of much the same idea include, back in the dotcom boom days, if the receptionist had a flat screen monitor rather than a CRT. John Harvey Jones, ex-head of ICI, has long used a very similar judgement call. Christopher Fildes, perhaps the doyen of English financial journalism, used to make much the same point as Don Sull. Indeed, it’s difficult now to work out which one of them was quoting the other. …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest