It&#x27;s difficult to buy stock in a product.  It&#x27;s difficult to make an index fund of products.  It&#x27;s difficult to retire on &quot;product dividends.&quot;<p>Companies exist as an attempt to get all the money in the world, and most fail that goal.  Apple is pretty close.  Refusal to acknowledge failure as <i>failure</i> is pathological insanity.  Getting paid to fail (or to &quot;soft land&quot; and save face on an outright failure) doesn&#x27;t mean the fail didn&#x27;t happen.