Since Apple began losing ground in the stock market five months ago, bloggers from all walks of life began painting a doom and gloom picture of the Cupertino giant. The majority of the claims some bloggers made were not well thought out, but a recent Forbes article did a far better job at analyzing Apple's situation, while outlining a few areas that need fixing.

Eric Jackson, a contributor at Forbes, laid out five key areas Apple needs to attend to in order for the company to get back on its feet. These areas, according to Jackson, are viewed as big problems, and should be taken care of as soon as possible:

1. Relatively weak cloud services: "Does Apple have enough cloud talent inside the company to continue to grow and develop iCloud? It's debatable."
2. A less than optimal approach to Internet services: "Apple is again taking a go slow and grind it out approach to these. MobileMe didn't work. We'll learn from that. Apple Maps didn't work. We'll learn from that. The thinking seems to be internally: we don't need to be first to market with great services, we just need to get to market. Sadly though, consumers seem to be getting more and more impatient in waiting around for Apple."
3. A bad track record with social products: "From an internal skill set perspective, it's not obvious that Apple can understand social and take advantage of its evolution from here, without having a lot of internal talent who live and breathe social."
4. Difficulties with big acquisitions: "The Quattro Wireless deal - I would conclude - was unsuccessful. The founders are gone. Did Apple really get everything they could have out of it with iAd? I don't think so. Siri is also an interesting case study. Apple has of course made it a major focus and selling point for the new iPhones starting last year. And it's now under the purview of Eddy Cue and an outsider who came in from Amazon search. But the Siri founders are also out of the company now."
5. An apparent lack of awareness that Apple has some big problems: "Maybe they do know [they have weaknesses] and are actively working on it. But if that's true, it's really not at all obvious. Apple's culture is tremendously secretive. They also have tremendous talent there. But the DNA of the company is really just working away in silence away from the eyes of others."

Jackson did recognized that a team at Apple could be actively working on ways to fix these issues. CEO Tim Cook might want to push his team to hurry and get the job done before things fall out of control.