Apple Stock Watch - Apple Up, Markets Jump, Adobe Settles Suits

by , 7:00 AM EDT, July 30th, 2002

Monday Market Activity

From the opening bell on Monday, the major market indexes pushed higher as the bulls ran rampant on Wall Street. Fueled by investor optimism that the worst of the corporate losses and accounting scandals had been put behind the markets, traders sent stock prices to near-record single-session gains.

The major market indexes rose steadily throughout the trading day. When the closing bell sounded the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 447.49 points at 8,711.88. The S&P 500 Index rose 46.12, to match the Dow's 5.41 percent increase on the day while the NASDAQ Composite Index moved up 5.79 percent or 73.13 to close at 1,335.25. Apple powered higher by $.68, up 4.74 percent at $15.02, despite lower than average volume for the Mac maker.

Apple

In an announcement that surprised many Apple watchers, Sun Microsystems and Apple Computer are working together to produce a Mac OS X version of Sun's popular StarOffice productivity suite. Apple's reliance on Microsoft and its Mac version of Office for enterprise sales has long been one of the Mac platform's well-known vulnerabilities. Sun's willingness to partner with Apple on development of an OpenOffice productivity suite and a commercial version of StarOffice for the Mac in 2003 may enhance the Mac's appeal among corporate technology buyers.

In the days preceding the recent MACWORLD Expo in New York, the head of Microsoft's Mac business unit openly criticized Apple for failing to push the sales of OS X which according to Microsoft, has lead to poor sales of Microsoft Office for OS X. At the time, Microsoft had sold roughly 300,000 copies of the OS X version of its office productivity product. Microsoft had expected sales of about 750,000 units at that point in time. The Microsoft executive went so far as to call into question Microsoft's commitment to future development of Office for the Mac after a scheduled 2003 product update. In response, a senior Apple executive suggested that Microsoft look at its hefty price for the product before blaming Apple for lackluster sales. The announcement about StarOffice for Mac OS X may be a more forceful response by Apple to the Microsoft public threat to end future development of Office for the Mac.

Adobe Systems

Earlier today Adobe Systems and Macromedia announced that they had reached a settlement to resolve the litigation between the two companies concerning patent infringement issues. Each company had won a patent infringement lawsuit against the other. In today's torrid trading Adobe jumped $1.12 to end the day at $25.61 while Macromedia jumped more than 11 percent to close up $.82 at $8.05.

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