9 ms·

> You cannot do business in China without doing what they tell you. Of course, I get that. But it's always companies like Apple that make so much noise about

• enraged_camel 9y ago
  I don't get your complaint at all. What would you rather have them do? What would "sticking to their guns" involve? Or would you rather have them not "make so much noise" about social justice?
  • tziki 9y ago
    They could always do what Google did and abandon China.
    • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      Google was aspirational in China when it left: they weren't making much money there...they hoped to in the future. Apple is not aspirational in China today: they are already making a lot of money there. Leaving China would cause an immediate shock to its stock price as well as a huge cut in actual profits.
      • smichel17 9y ago
        ...the profit motive makes it okay! /s
        • rayuela 9y ago
          The profit means Cook keeps his job
        • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
          It means that either Cook is CEO of Apple, or he isn't. Either way, Apple will still be in China.
        • deleted 9y ago
          [deleted]
      • KMag 9y ago
        > Google was aspirational in China when it left: they weren't making much money there...they hoped to in the future. I was an engineer on Google's web search indexing system for 4 years (including the Aurora attack), leaving shortly before Google's China exit. I listened to several talks by the head of Google China, who came from Baidu. Even before the Aurora attack, as a matter of national pride, we knew the very best Google could hope for was 30% or 40% market share in China. Even France funded one or two attempts at a Francophone Google killer. I can't imagine the U.S. looking at a dominant search company based out of anywhere except North America (or perhaps the Anglophone Five Eyes) and not butting up significant nationalistic barriers. Google was hoping to make profits, but they knew they would never be dominant. This made their exit much easier. If Google was serious about China, they would have had a more obscure non-Google-branded name for their Chinese joint venture and would have branded their front page much differently. The reasons would take a large post, but Chinese web pages tend to be much more "busy", and Chinese language searches have a much higher percentage of "navigational searches". (If you search for [Facebook], you're almost certainly just trying to just get a link to facebook.com, and are basically using the search engine like a bookmark page.) I understand Google's need for a consistent U.I., but they really should have had a non-Google-branded U.I. that was better suited to the Chinese market.
        • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
          When you say "Chinese market" you mean mainland Chinese market. Google does just fine in Hong Kong and Taiwan, while Baidu is completely MIA outside of mainland China even in markets with significant Chinese populations.
        • shalmanese 9y ago
          The Baidu front page today basically looks like the Google front page.
    • joecool1029 9y ago
      Nah, they really can't. Apple's margins depend on Chinese labor to build their hardware. The two companies are very different.
      • choko 9y ago
        Market size and profit aren't an acceptable excuse for hypocrisy.
        • chii 9y ago
          i think you'll find that in the real world, those are almost always used as excuses, and the money makes it acceptable.
      • idlewords 9y ago
        That's an Apple business decision.
        • 19890903 9y ago
          100% agree. Their business, their rules.
          • yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
            And our prerogative to judge them when they behave unethically.
      • xienze 9y ago
        They could stop operating in Saudi Arabia to show their support for gay rights. But again, there's money to be made. Much easier to just slam Trump or whoever.
        • veridies 9y ago
          Saudi Arabia isn't demanding they cripple their products, so selling their products in Saudi Arabia isn't ethically fraught. And Apple isn't spending their time slamming Trump. They're a tech company, not a politician.
    • gareim 9y ago
      Google ended up losing the entire Chinese market to Baidu, who are going to end up being a global competitor, and the general population didn't even care that Google left. Apple learned from this that you could be a big deal in the West, but a nobody in the East.
      • imron 9y ago
        To be fair, they'd more or less already lost the entire Chinese market to Baidu before they left anyway (they had ~15% marketshare or something).
        • fma 9y ago
          Anecdote...my Chinese friends have said Google was poor for Chinese language searches. Might explain the 15% market share.
      • 1_2__4 9y ago
        Google lost nothing. China never had any intention of allowing Google to become dominant in China. That was apparent from day one and comports perfectly with their explicitly stated and demonstrated agenda.
        • ethbro 9y ago
          Agreed. When the explicit goal of arbitrarily changed rules are "We'll screw you in favor of a local competitor", why would you choose to play? Either you are successful, and then the rules are changed to disadvantage you further. Or you're unsuccessful because of the rules. Lose / lose.
          • jonny_eh 9y ago
            Or you lose because you lose fair and square. But you're right, either way you can't win.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    • natch 9y ago
      Google's phones aren't made in China? And is Google Play not in China? With Google I always wonder where the PR ends and the reality begins.
      • Zhenya 9y ago
        Google Play is not in China. Their phones are made many places. Lately in Taiwan and Korea.
    • jhedwards 9y ago
      This is something I never understood. Google has this "do no evil" value and because staying in China involved compromising this value they left. The result is that the Chinese people are short one search engine as well as _any_ good that Google could have done. This seems ultimately more evil to me. It's good for Google because they can say they upheld their values, and it's good for the Chinese government because now they have one less external factor to manage in their control of information. Perhaps there is more to this picture than I am seeing but that has always been my view. There's an ancient Chinese story where a farmer criticizes an official who exiled himself because the government is corrupt. As the fisherman departs he sings: "when the water of the river is clean I wash my hat in the river, when the waters are dirty I wash my feet in the river". What good can the virtuous official do living out in the mountains? Instead you should adapt your participation to the conditions of the playing field.
      • CountSessine 9y ago
        It's good for Google because they can say they upheld their values, and it's good for the Chinese government because now they have one less external factor to manage in their control of information. Perhaps there is more to this picture than I am seeing but that has always been my view I don't see how they could have stayed in China and not been involved in things that are truly evil. When the government phones you up and tells you to hide search results related to babies dying from diluted baby formula (yes, this happened), could you in good conscience tell one of your engineers to add that filter? How could a company like Google possibly retain good people when they have to ask them to do the bidding of such an evil government?
        • jhedwards 9y ago
          Yes I agree, this is an angle that actually came to my mind after posting my original comment. At the end of the day there had to be Google engineers in China doing the job, real people actually implementing censorship. So if Google being in China meant that employees had to be involved in inhumane acts, I'm not surprised they would leave.
      • Infinitesimus 9y ago
  • honksillet 9y ago
    Don't do business in china! It's that simple. If you can't do business in a local without getting blood on your hands, then don't do business there.
    • ethbro 9y ago
      This. A market being large isn't an excuse for bloody hands. Furthermore, don't let Chinese companies trade on US exchanges if they participate in human rights abuses. Everyone knows what the Chinese government is doing strategically with leveraging access to their markets in exchange for control and forced tech transfer. Other countries are well within their moral rights to insist upon a quid pro quo... or else do the same to Chinese companies (who are just starting to reach scales where international expansion is as important to them as domestic).
      • derefr 9y ago
        The problem for product companies is that the secondary market still exists, and people's perceptions of a brand can be affected by its secondary market just as well as they can by its primary market. If Apple isn't in China, that doesn't mean that nobody will be able to sell iPhones in China. That just means that Apple won't be selling iPhones in China. But someone, somewhere will still be importing iPhones into China, and people will buy them, and people will associate the resulting product experience with Apple. Those people will then blog about that experience, putting their perceptions on the world stage, where people in other countries' perceptions of the product can be affected by that conversation. Which means that, if Apple has no Chinese app-store, then people in America will end up thinking worse of Apple. The American zeitgeist will be touched by Chinese-Americans who read Chinese-language blogs written by people living in China, where the experience of having an iPhone will suck because Apple "doesn't support China."
        • ethbro 9y ago
          This generalizes to "Apple should do business with everyone" though. And it's not really moral high ground if you're taking it through no cost to yourself.
  • jMyles 9y ago
    > What would "sticking to their guns" involve? Leave the apps in the app store and make the government make the next move. They're fucking Apple, they can do a lot to help finally topple that mess. It's something that needs to happen in my lifetime, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a company who otherwise trumpets about social justice to be a part of it.
    • mwfunk 9y ago
      They can't do a lot if the resultant stock crash causes the board to fire the executives. Executives call the shots but in publicly traded companies their continued employment is decided by the board (who represent investors, who literally only care about stock prices). Really the big problem here are the constraints imposed on publicly traded companies, which I think do more harm than good in many cases.
    • fma 9y ago
      I would imagine Google thought the same. If this was five or more years ago and Xiaomi did not exist, there may be more pressure from the people. However there is a good alternative to the iPhone and the government would probably just say take it or leave it. It would give the government the perfect excuse to ban iPhone and have their citizens use a home grown phone that would be more compliant to the government's wishes.
    • briandear 9y ago
      Then China blocks all Apple devices and services. In 5 minutes Apple is demolished in China. So what’s Apple’s response? Close factories? That would disrupt their supply chain for years, potentially collapsing the company. All the cash in the world can’t retool and rebuild a factory overnight. If anyone cares about this situation “for real,” you’d boycott every single Chinese made product because by owning a Chinese product, YOU are a hypocrite. You can’t expect Apple to stop selling to China if you aren’t willing to stop buying from China. While you’re at it, stop buying from Mexico because elements of the government facilitate the execution of reporters. Don’t buy from Indonesia because they give the death penalty for minor drug offenses. Find me a country and I can find you something about which to be outraged. Even the “progressive” EU has enacted or attempted to enact laws abridging free speech. You can’t even print the word Nazi in Germany without facing potential criminal charges. As horrible as Nazis and neo-Nazis are, censoring their speech is STILL a violation of human rights. Free speech isn’t just that with which you agree, but it’s the expression of ideas – regardless of how detestable they may be. Germany sees Nazi speech as a threat to public order and perhaps they are correct, but in the same vein, China sees talk of Tiananmen or other such topics as threats to their public order. Should Google, Facebook and Apple pull outmoded Germany? Because it’s the exact same thing. We just happen to agree with censoring Nazi speech while we disagree with censoring “democracy-speech.” Both are censorship applied by a government due to a real or perceived threat to their systems. Plenty of people here were willing to boycott US states over bathroom laws yet almost every single one of you has something you own made in China – a country with far bigger human rights issues than the hole in which one pees. While pointing fingers at Apple, one ought to be pointing fingers at oneself as well.
  • bsder 9y ago
    > What would you rather have them do? What would "sticking to their guns" involve? Start building factories elsewhere. Help put together a similar manufacturing ecosystem in a different country. Automate their manufacture so much that it no longer matters if labor is done in China. If Apple paid an extra 10-20% to locate factories elsewhere and started pulling out of China, it would be a gigantic hit to China while being only a 20% hit to Apple. And Apple could threaten China instead of China threatening Apple. And China wouldn't dream of making these kinds of requests again. Apple has more leverage than they are willing to use.
    • grwthckrmstr 9y ago
      I wish that happened. Not just, but all the other companies (including the clothing line owned by Ivanka Trump) But Apple/all others wouldn't.. Because 20% profit. Driven by our own capitalist agendas, we're the ones fuelling China after all.
  • dlwdlw 9y ago
    Sanction based behavior is just another form a bullying. It's not much different than physical, psychological or social bullying. Similar to bullying, it doesn't work when the target can fight back. Sanction based actions just seem like bullshit to me and is actually exactly what China wants. It gives space for domestic equivalents to grow. (the trick is to having your self created monopoly not rot is to keep it in its toes) China for better or worse is becoming (is) a global power. It's the only country that is managing efficiently at its scale so criticisms fall flat. It's great for western indignation for them to feel-good about themselves. The realization that the previous bullying is no longer working creates the same sense of desperation and grasping for relevance that trump supporters have. I'd rather the market make the decisions. Not because they don't have failure points but because they organically create understanding through mixing of values. The non-organic too down forcing of value systems doesn't work unless one party can effectively bully the other.