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I don't think disabling the enterprise certs was particularly moral, Facebook and Google were flagrantly violating the terms of the enterprise program. Apple al

I don't think disabling the enterprise certs was particularly moral, Facebook and Google were flagrantly violating the terms of the enterprise program. Apple also apparently didn't even notice (or didn't care) until articles about it started getting a lot of attention. Apple definitely does make some commendable decisions, but I think it's also important to distinguish between bravery and what Ben Thompson calls "Strategy Credits" (https://stratechery.com/2013/strategy-credit/ https://stratechery.com/2013/strategy-credit/): > Strategy Credit: An uncomplicated decision that makes a company look good relative to other companies who face much more significant trade-offs.

curt15 7y ago
Indeed a company's "morals" are better exposed when it has to make inconvenient choices.
- wwright 7y ago
  I would say true morals lead to structuring your company in such a way that you don’t have to rely on business people making ethical decisions moment to moment, because they won’t.
  - duncanawoods 7y ago
    As nice as that sounds, I think it requires an impossibly perfect prediction of future events. You face ethical decisions whenever you have power or limited resources.
    - wwright 7y ago
      Yeah, I agree, but I think that is just a way of stating that morals are impossible to perfect.
      - duncanawoods 7y ago
        Hmm maybe - what I have in mind is that you could run something undeniably good e.g. a hospital, and you will still face hard ethical decisions about how you handle uncertainty, apply power or allocate your resources. Doing good things just isn’t easy!
    - erikpukinskis 7y ago
      No. You can bend your business model towards transactions you are comfortable with, without perfect future vision, or even a clear strategic understanding of how that might happen. In fact, the world around you will bend to meet your values whether you’re even aware of it. And that includes any companies you run. The world does extend beyond your knowledge of it.
      - Retric 7y ago
        The same forces that require several levels of management make it increasingly difficult to enforce ethical decisions. Basically, when no one person can keep track of all the moving pieces you get splits around what individuals think is acceptable behavior. The larger organizations grows the more things tend to diverge, with different branches often having wildly different perspectives. This tends to further degrade as new employees are added and any whatever original vision was going on continues to degrade over time. Especially as both the times and even business models change.
        erikpukinskis 7y ago
        Yes, and all of those are decisions you can go along with or reject. Deciding how big an organization you will join is one of many ways you apply your ethics.
        Retric 7y ago
        That’s another issue. As an organization is viewed as less ethical, only less ethical people join creating a downward spiral.
        chongli 7y ago
        Hopefully the unethical organization develops a reputation for being unethical. Then only unethical people will patronize said organization. Ideally, unethical behaviour leads to marginalization, though obviously that does not always happen in practice.
  - lmm 7y ago
    You can certainly form a company whose line of business minimizes how many ethical questions it will face; I'd consider that to be ducking out and ultimately less moral than entering a business where there are genuinely tough ethical questions that you will need to take positions on (and inevitably sometimes get wrong).
  - philwelch 7y ago
    How is that even possible?
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
  For example between easily upgradeable environment-friendly product and a box of glued components with no-user replaceable parts so that they need to buy a new item in the line sooner.
judge2020 7y ago
> Apple also apparently didn't even notice Do they have any information about enterprise apps? As I understand it, Apple never phones home with app info (such as the identifier, name, etc) when verifying or installing enterprise-signed apps, so the only thing they know is probably the IP address requesting to verify the enterprise-signed app and the frequency of how often Apple devices do this certificate verification. Considering FB and Google have many employees in all different parts of the world, it wouldn't be too suspicious to see a good amount of diversity between GeoIP regions. Correct me if i'm wrong about what info Apple collects about enterprise apps.
- spsful 7y ago
  As far as I can see this is correct. Even if devices are enrolled In Apple's Enterprise MDM program, the administration staff are the ones who get to see which applications are installed on the iDevice, not Apple. And I really do not think they are so preoccupied with this that they want to actively scan IP addresses for suspicious behavior (of which there probably isn't any to begin with). Anyway I wholehartedly agree with you here and I think Apple genuinely had no knowledge of this activity until news outlets reported on it. Or if they did, it did not make its way to the higher-ups that revoke developer certs.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Going forwards, Apple will require that companies provide their enterprise apps to be audited.
  - judge2020 7y ago
    I see them adding something like the macOS "notarization" requirement to iOS enterprise apps.
jonfw 7y ago
I'm not convinced that morality and self-interest are mutually exclusive. Very often the best decision for a given entity to make is a moral one. We should still reward/praise companies who make decisions that are morally superior to their competitors, regardless of whether the morality itself was a primary motivation.
- psandersen 7y ago
  I personally believe morality and self interest strongly overlap over the long term, but short term they are largely independent conditional on the probability of getting caught... Humans might have too short lifespans, memories and limited rationality for the long term benefit of morality to be strongly in our individual self interest though... one of the possible benefits of anti-aging and cognitive enhancement tech is it might incentivize us to be more moral all other things equal as a side effect.
joejerryronnie 7y ago
Yeah, I'm not sure I attribute Apple and Tim Cook's latest stances to strong moral fortitude. I think it's more corporate 101: 1) Public sentiment is hammering companies for perceived privacy violations 2) Our business model does not rely heavily on selling user data 3) Make public statements about how much we value privacy at literally no cost to us 4) Get in a good dig at our competition at the same time
- peteretep 7y ago
  Perhaps. But I also find it easy to buy that a guy who grew up gay in Alabama could think privacy is of fundamental importance.
  - okintheory 7y ago
    Indeed. But I also think that Zuckerberg, Bezos, Page & Brin all value their own privacy. They just don't value your privacy that much.
    - zjaffee 7y ago
      Zuckerberg definitely does, there are pictures of him with tape over his webcam, microphones taped, ect.
dymk 7y ago
"Strategy Credits" were rebranded as "Virtue Signaling" circa 2017
- ben_w 7y ago
  Those are very different things. The former is doing the latter is showing.

curt15 7y ago

Indeed a company's "morals" are better exposed when it has to make inconvenient choices.

wwright 7y ago
I would say true morals lead to structuring your company in such a way that you don’t have to rely on business people making ethical decisions moment to moment, because they won’t.
- duncanawoods 7y ago
  As nice as that sounds, I think it requires an impossibly perfect prediction of future events. You face ethical decisions whenever you have power or limited resources.
  - wwright 7y ago
    Yeah, I agree, but I think that is just a way of stating that morals are impossible to perfect.
    - duncanawoods 7y ago
      Hmm maybe - what I have in mind is that you could run something undeniably good e.g. a hospital, and you will still face hard ethical decisions about how you handle uncertainty, apply power or allocate your resources. Doing good things just isn’t easy!
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    No. You can bend your business model towards transactions you are comfortable with, without perfect future vision, or even a clear strategic understanding of how that might happen. In fact, the world around you will bend to meet your values whether you’re even aware of it. And that includes any companies you run. The world does extend beyond your knowledge of it.
    - Retric 7y ago
      The same forces that require several levels of management make it increasingly difficult to enforce ethical decisions. Basically, when no one person can keep track of all the moving pieces you get splits around what individuals think is acceptable behavior. The larger organizations grows the more things tend to diverge, with different branches often having wildly different perspectives. This tends to further degrade as new employees are added and any whatever original vision was going on continues to degrade over time. Especially as both the times and even business models change.
      - erikpukinskis 7y ago
        Yes, and all of those are decisions you can go along with or reject. Deciding how big an organization you will join is one of many ways you apply your ethics.
        Retric 7y ago
        That’s another issue. As an organization is viewed as less ethical, only less ethical people join creating a downward spiral.
        chongli 7y ago
        Hopefully the unethical organization develops a reputation for being unethical. Then only unethical people will patronize said organization. Ideally, unethical behaviour leads to marginalization, though obviously that does not always happen in practice.
- lmm 7y ago
  You can certainly form a company whose line of business minimizes how many ethical questions it will face; I'd consider that to be ducking out and ultimately less moral than entering a business where there are genuinely tough ethical questions that you will need to take positions on (and inevitably sometimes get wrong).
- philwelch 7y ago
  How is that even possible?
dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
For example between easily upgradeable environment-friendly product and a box of glued components with no-user replaceable parts so that they need to buy a new item in the line sooner.

judge2020 7y ago

> Apple also apparently didn't even notice Do they have any information about enterprise apps? As I understand it, Apple never phones home with app info (such as the identifier, name, etc) when verifying or installing enterprise-signed apps, so the only thing they know is probably the IP address requesting to verify the enterprise-signed app and the frequency of how often Apple devices do this certificate verification. Considering FB and Google have many employees in all different parts of the world, it wouldn't be too suspicious to see a good amount of diversity between GeoIP regions. Correct me if i'm wrong about what info Apple collects about enterprise apps.

spsful 7y ago
As far as I can see this is correct. Even if devices are enrolled In Apple's Enterprise MDM program, the administration staff are the ones who get to see which applications are installed on the iDevice, not Apple. And I really do not think they are so preoccupied with this that they want to actively scan IP addresses for suspicious behavior (of which there probably isn't any to begin with). Anyway I wholehartedly agree with you here and I think Apple genuinely had no knowledge of this activity until news outlets reported on it. Or if they did, it did not make its way to the higher-ups that revoke developer certs.
saagarjha 7y ago
Going forwards, Apple will require that companies provide their enterprise apps to be audited.
- judge2020 7y ago
  I see them adding something like the macOS "notarization" requirement to iOS enterprise apps.

jonfw 7y ago

I'm not convinced that morality and self-interest are mutually exclusive. Very often the best decision for a given entity to make is a moral one. We should still reward/praise companies who make decisions that are morally superior to their competitors, regardless of whether the morality itself was a primary motivation.

psandersen 7y ago
I personally believe morality and self interest strongly overlap over the long term, but short term they are largely independent conditional on the probability of getting caught... Humans might have too short lifespans, memories and limited rationality for the long term benefit of morality to be strongly in our individual self interest though... one of the possible benefits of anti-aging and cognitive enhancement tech is it might incentivize us to be more moral all other things equal as a side effect.

joejerryronnie 7y ago

Yeah, I'm not sure I attribute Apple and Tim Cook's latest stances to strong moral fortitude. I think it's more corporate 101: 1) Public sentiment is hammering companies for perceived privacy violations 2) Our business model does not rely heavily on selling user data 3) Make public statements about how much we value privacy at literally no cost to us 4) Get in a good dig at our competition at the same time

peteretep 7y ago
Perhaps. But I also find it easy to buy that a guy who grew up gay in Alabama could think privacy is of fundamental importance.
- okintheory 7y ago
  Indeed. But I also think that Zuckerberg, Bezos, Page & Brin all value their own privacy. They just don't value your privacy that much.
  - zjaffee 7y ago
    Zuckerberg definitely does, there are pictures of him with tape over his webcam, microphones taped, ect.

dymk 7y ago

"Strategy Credits" were rebranded as "Virtue Signaling" circa 2017

ben_w 7y ago
Those are very different things. The former is doing the latter is showing.