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> He has to comply to local laws, even though it interferes with his own point of view because lots of money is at stake. He can't say it in this conference Is
by usaphp 9y ago
> He has to comply to local laws, even though it interferes with his own point of view because lots of money is at stake. He can't say it in this conference
Isn’t it the same reason why most of the corrupt people do what they do. There is a lot of money on stake for them and they decide to close their eyes on the corruption around them and actively participate in that vehicle.
Cook is doing exactly the same, he is putting money in front of his moral principles.
If he is so vocal about freedom or whatever, he should take a stand and do something at least in his own company, if his board or investors are pressuring him - he should quit or do something about it, because right now - whatever he says about fighting for freedom is just a complete farce.
- emodendroket 9y agoIf you're looking to public for-profit corporations to, of their own volition, take some sort of ethical stand, you're going to be disappointed more often than not.
- richardknop 9y agoAgreed. We should expect governments to take ethical stands not for profit companies that only care about profit. Unfortunately western governments are also being totally hypocritical when it comes to China.
- dailyvijeos 9y agoHypocracy is a bikeshedding dimension. China and the US both serve the politically-connected first and the people last; China does it by force and the US does it by manufacturing consent. Regardless of political system, the people must rise up and demand a fair government and insist on sensible regulations and justice with eternal vigilance. Power never cedes anything without a fight.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- emodendroket 9y agoI think it's getting carried away to say there's no different. The US isn't quite what we'd like it to be, but you will not be kidnapped and charged with a trumped up crime for running a book store that sells books critical of the United States government. Noam Chomsky remains a free man.
- eecc 9y agoCompanies only care for profit inasmuch we allow them to do so. A couple laws would deal with the problem quite rapidly but we first need to get this social-darwinistic neoliberal ideology out of our collective arses...
- TeMPOraL 9y agoWhat are the proposed "couple laws" that could help here? I fail to imagine how laws can convince a profit-maximizing entity to stop behaving like profit-maximizing entity.
- eecc 9y agoWell, just off the top of my head - IANAL not an economist - but it would suffice to change by law the set of stakeholders that have a legal say on the company and you’re done.
- jpetso 9y agoYeah! For example, the government could become a stakeholder in all companies to ensure that the populace's interest is taken into account in addition to profit... wait a second, that's what China's doing
- emodendroket 9y agoI don't know how practical that is as a solution to social ills, but whether China is doing it or not doesn't really make it good or bad.
- jpetso 9y agoYes, that's true. What I wanted to point out is that a good idea in theory can quickly turn into an instrument that's being used for other purposes. China is a great example to be studied in this regard. Their changes do indeed ensure that profit will only be one of several considerations for company policies in China; this will undoubtedly result in more consumer-friendly corporate behavior, but it also tightens central control and is likely to deepen the kind of censorship measures that I personally would not want to wish on any person or company. Letting all people (of a given country) have a say means involving the government in which the company's headquarters are located. I'd rather not have national[istic] interests working from within companies, I feel laws and regulations are better suited to get a fair & transparent outcome. The German model that the sibling comment brought up is quite sane in comparison. It limits the stakeholders to only those who actively participate in production, which provides a kind of decentralization enforced by laws, but not directly steered by central interests. In terms of overall benefit to society, it's hard to argue against that model and it has served the Germans well. (However, it's also worth noting that having unions sit on the board doesn't prevent the company from making unfavorable decisions outside of the limited national and workplace-environment-related interest of the extra stakeholders, and often those changes can only be deferred / slowed down but not outright avoided.)
- Jedi72 9y agoYou act as though business is this totally seperate thing to life. Business is some fancy legal words wrapped around the activities of groups of people. Saying businesses are only driven by profit is not fundamentally different from saying "employees and shareholders of Apple are greedy people who put personal gain over the moral principles of our society"
- TeMPOraL 9y agoIt's a practical point of view, not theory of society. It's great when companies put morals over profits, but they generally don't - companies don't gain much from being good and don't lose much from being evil; the impact is not big enough to offset the importance of being effective on the market. Companies that fail to be effective get outcompeted and die.
- emodendroket 9y agoIn the shorter term they are likely to face pressure from investors if they're doing something like taking a stand that shuts them out of a huge market like China.
- emodendroket 9y agoOrganizational dynamics frequently lead to organizations behaving in a way that their members probably would not conduct themselves in their personal lives.
- new299 9y ago"When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody" return on investment, Cook said. http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-ceo-tim-cook-companies-should-have-values-like-people-2016-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-ceo-tim-cook-companies-... Ultimately of course, these things do have a return, even just in PR. How Apple operates in China has some effect on its US sales and market position... so I guess Tim has to play a careful game.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoIt's easy to not consider ROI when one's talking about investment with non-negative gains strictly under your control. If you have money to spare, making your devices accessible will not reduce your profits, and there's a chance it'll increase them. OTOH, pissing off China could mean huge losses for Apple, and that makes it a different story altogether.
- eftychis 9y agoExactly. Even if Cook stands up for his (or our) ideals, the pressure China is going to apply to Apple will result in Cook getting ousted by the board, replaced by a favorable "Cook". Companies (for profit or not) answer to their major stockholders. Even politics in a (democratic) country (EU or U.S. or X, place possibly your country where X) follow a similar mechanism: politicians conform with the wishes of the major coalitions that will keep them in power. Sure one can leave footprints of their ideals, but after some threshold they are intrinsically bound by their power base (usually lobbying).
- saurik 9y agoI think the point many people are making is that "I will be replaced by someone willing to do this morally reprehensible job" is not an excuse for doing the job yourself, as that 1) increases the pool of people who are willing to do the job and allows more bad things to happen and 2) as people are not purely replaceable, it isn't clear that the Board of Apple will be in a good place to find someone as competent at supply chains as Tim Cook to replace him... particularly someone who is both competent and willing to play with China.
- gcb0 9y agothanks for pointing the obvious! Now you are going to say that the world is also full of criminals? oh my god! who would have thought?
- emodendroket 9y agoIt doesn't seem to be that obvious to everyone.
- pjmlp 9y agoWhich is why I find a joke to force employees to do some kind of company values training, with certification, because in the end they get thrown out the window the moment the money sings, regardless of how noble they state "better loose a deal that give up on the values".
- intended 9y agoThats the wrong way to look at it - Its not that value training stops the world from being as it is. Instead imagine a world without even the lip service necessary for value training. In other words consider an unfettered race to the bottom.
- brynjolf 9y agoSo we shouldn't hold anyone accountable? Just give up? Yesterday Hackernews talked about how Apple was just focused on making money and they should ignore any moral implications, today we are supposed to feel compassion and understanding for poor Tim Cook? It just sounds like everyone has Apple as their idol and they can't do any wrong.
- michaelt 9y agoSo we shouldn't hold anyone accountable? Just give up? What's needed here is a coalition. If N companies pulled out of China and it didn't liberalise, they've incurred a cost for no benefit. If N+1 pulled out and it did trigger China to liberalise, they'd benefit from doing it. The trick is finding the N+1 companies and convincing them they're enough to be the trigger.
- emodendroket 9y agoI mean it's probably more effective to make it more painful for them not to act than to act.
- Chaebixi 9y ago> If N companies pulled out of China and it didn't liberalise, they've incurred a cost for no benefit. If N+1 pulled out and it did trigger China to liberalise, they'd benefit from doing it. > The trick is finding the N+1 companies and convincing them they're enough to be the trigger. It seems like China has been pretty successful at preventing the actual dependence on foreign companies needed for that strategy to have its indented effect. For instance, if Apple pulls out, Chinese who can afford an iPhone are just going to have to settle for a Huawei. The only chance I see is a general reduction in trade or foreign-driven manufacturing hurting the overall Chinese economy, but that would take a lot of companies to accomplish. https://9to5mac.com/2017/05/23/iphone-market-share-gartner-q1-2017/ https://9to5mac.com/2017/05/23/iphone-market-share-gartner-q...
- mistermann 9y agoThe funny thing is, not doing this is just kicking the can down the road. Chinese companies with their protected access to the gigantic and prosperous Chinese market, will eventually be "good enough" to crush all others, across virtually all markets.
- musage 9y agoThat's because corporations don't have volition and don't take actions. People in them do. And the responsibility remains with those individual people.
- kryptiskt 9y agoAs long as there is a correlation between reputation and profits, there is leverage to shame them into behaving properly.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago> Cook is doing exactly the same, he is putting money in front of his moral principles. Put it this way, if Tim Cook acted the other way as you wanted, he simply wouldn’t be CEO anymore; the board would have him promptly removed. You can’t head up a public company and leave that much money on the ground.
- nailer 9y agoDidn't Google leave China a few years back, doing exactly that?
- usaphp 9y agoGoogle left because their main business is collecting information about people to sell them ads later, China did not allow that - thats why they left, they did not leave because of their great moral stand.
- Oletros 9y agoAny source about China not allowing collecting information?
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoThat isn’t true at all. First, China allows collecting similar info about people as in the west, and all the Chinese internet companies do it probably more aggressively than their international counterparts. Second, google left china (search market) because the Chinese government was hacking gmail accounts to root out dissidents.
- kmonsen 9y agoGoogle left because China hacked them: https://www.google.com/search?q=china+google+hack https://www.google.com/search?q=china+google+hack
- dis-sys 9y agoyou mean the company named google that literally pay no tax to countries where it is making big $? check news, countries like UK and Australia were forced to come up with google tax to fight such criminal offences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_tax
- make3 9y agoexcept that his job is precisely only to make money for his company
- gcb0 9y agoThat's a very lazy excuse for something. Also, his job is to preside the company. That involves keeping manpower happy and productive. Keeping public opinion in check. And also, making a profit.
- Intermernet 9y agoTrue, but he has taken personal stances in the past while representing Apple the company. If you believe that the only role he has is to make money for his company, then you have to disregard his previous personal statements as nothing but PR. He can't have it both ways.
- 50CNT 9y agoSo you're saying Tim Cook should throw away whatever leverage he has to change these things in order to appear valorous? Maybe what Cook has said about freedom is a complete farce. Maybe it isn't. Taking a stand against the Chinese government might win him points on HN, but not with the Chinese government. And at the end of the day, they make the call on whether they'll tear down the wall or close the gates.
- leereeves 9y agoIf he's not willing to "throw [them] away", and the Chinese know that, they aren't leverage.
- 50CNT 9y agoI didn't say how much leverage he had. Though whatever privacy focused technology they manage to get away with under the watchful eye of the party is still a win on the freedoms front. End-to-end encrypted imessage, secure enclave, etc. And he still gets to consort with the Chinese to whatever degree he is able to.
- Fnoord 9y agoThe only reason Cook would be vocal about being a freedom fighter is when its in his interests as CEO of Apple. Cook is a servant of the shareholders; not the US public or Chinese public. Their goal is to increase Apple's profit margins & volume ("profit"), not to increase liberty among the US, or spread liberty across the world. He's CEO of Apple, not chairman of Amnesty International. I don't understand why people keep confusing the two as if CEOs are some kind of philanthropists. They're not. They're egocentric maniacs who represent their big business. That's what they're trained for, and what they're good at. See also the documentary The Corporation. IMDB's summary [1]: "Documentary that looks at the concept of the corporation throughout recent history up to its present-day dominance." or Metacritic's summary [2] "This feature documentary analyzes the very nature of the corporate institution, its impacts on our planet, and what people are doing in response." Also interesting is the correlation between CEOs and psychopaths [3]. [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/ [2] http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-corporation http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-corporation [3] http://time.com/32647/which-professions-have-the-most-psychopaths-the-fewest/ http://time.com/32647/which-professions-have-the-most-psycho...
- jtmarl1n 9y agoI think people confuse the two because of the perceived doublespeak. In general, people accept that a CEO's responsibilities are to the shareholders, no arguments there. I think the disconnect comes from speaking publicly about the importance of freedoms but then complying with Chinese censorship. If you're going to comply, which they have every right to do as a business, don't provide lip service about the importance of openness and freedom of information, individuals, etc.
- BearGoesChirp 9y agoIt is simpler to think of anything said by a CEO as being a complete farce. They are doing what makes the share holders money, and if they aren't, they won't be a CEO for long. They'll be exceptions, but the accuracy rate may be at tolerable rates without accounting for them.