4 ms·
Are you trying to decide what revenue goes to cover which cost for a company worth $3T?
by enos_feedler 5y ago
Are you trying to decide what revenue goes to cover which cost for a company worth $3T?
- grishka 5y agoAnd by the way, they have so much money sitting in banks doing nothing, they could as well just start giving everything away for free and it'll last them for 20 years.
- can16358p 5y agoIf they were a charity or non profit sure. But why on Earth a for-profit company, whose reason for existing, by definition, is to make money, would give away money?
- grishka 5y agoBecause it has already made several orders of magnitude more money than an amount it would know what to do with? I don't understand this whole idea of keeping on increasing your profits when you already make enough money thousand times over.
- rlt 5y agoEmployees and other shareholders benefit when the value of the company increases. Why is that hard to understand why they'd want to increase profits?
- grishka 5y agoEmployees get their salaries either way. Shareholders? They do nothing useful for the society and won't be missed. The way I see it, companies literally ruin the world for mostly imperceptible, and mostly abstract, benefit of the very few.
- Ntrails 5y ago> The way I see it, companies literally ruin the world for mostly imperceptible, and mostly abstract, benefit of the very few. How do you build a car without a company? How do you get 100 people to work together? How do you get components, carry out testing, and still keep people "fed and watered"? The only other answer I have ever heard is "the state".
- grishka 5y agoI don't mean "don't earn money at all and go full communism". I mean "stop making active steps towards increasing profits when your income already covers your expenses ten times over". I also meant "for-profit", and probably publicly-traded, companies specifically. A company doesn't have to be of this type. There are privately-owned companies that build products people genuinely love. There also are nonprofits.
- Ntrails 5y agoPrivately owned companies merely enrich their owners. If anything they are more likely to prioritise profits. Large charities accumulate wealth endlessly through active fundraising despite having enough to cover their costs for over a decade. The issue isn't the collective fiction of the "company", it is "humans" and an inherent greed and self centredness (imo)
- grishka 5y agoI must be some wrong type of human then.
- enos_feedler 5y agoIf you think Apple employees are fixated on their salary, you don't know enough Apple employees. It's all about the stock grants that vest over 4 years. When you get enough of those overlapping and the stock has the growth of Apple, the only thing that matters is stock, not salary. The salary pays for your rent, food, shopping, car in the bay area. The stock builds your wealth.
- jb1991 5y agoI’m sure Apple’s shareholders would love your argument.
- can16358p 5y agoIt's not like two Steves started a company and one said hey we've got lots of cash let's spend it or do non-work cool stuff but the other went like keeping being greedy for more money. It's simply a publicly traded company (like many others) with shareholders and stocks and people are expecting the value to go up.
- grishka 5y agoUsually this kind of unchecked "growth" at all costs is counterbalanced by competition. Competition is what keeps companies from abusing their position. There's no competition in iOS app distribution. This is where antitrust needs to come in — urgently. This capitalism is broken, we need a new one.
- can16358p 5y agoNo one forces anyone to buy or use an iPhone (or Android). Why should a private company has to allow conpetition on their own platform for their own hardware?
- grishka 5y agoSigh. Here we go again. Could you please try looking at this from the developer perspective?
- enos_feedler 5y agoYou mean from the perspective of learning a language they invented (swift) so you can publish apps on a distribution channel they built? to users who feel safe and secure giving you money via their credit cards because of Apple's brand? so you can sit there and collect money on something with zero marginal cost? I am a developer. Been one since I was 12 years old writing x86 assembly code. Published apps on disks and distributed them at the local video rental store. The market size was probably 2000 people in my town. Let me tell you that what developers have access to today.. built on top of Apple's ROI machine, is incredible. From this perspective, for every $1 I make, I am happy to give apple .30 of it. The total pie is astronomical.
- markovbot 5y agoYep, you've correctly identified the problem!
- glaive123 5y agothis reply is brilliant, well done.
- NateEag 5y agoNo. I'm just saying that the cost of the average app developer team is likely offset by the income Apple makes from the average app developer team. Whether that's how they spend the money, I have no idea. I don't need to know how they spend it to guess that the costs and income probably roughly balance out.