11 ms·

Apple’s profit is always the priority–no matter the cost

100 points by carlycue 5y ago

rhelzerman 5y ago
You say "profit is always the priority" like its a bad thing. Aren't we all maximizing our profit? Isn't that kind of the point of being in business?
- pfortuny 5y ago
  Nope. Lots of people stay in business because they just like it AND it gives enough money for a reasonable life.
  - djbebs 5y ago
    What makes you think their enjoyment isn't profit?
    - spiderice 5y ago
      No one is saying it isn't. But that's clearly not what is being discussed here. This is just changing the definition mid argument.
    - trinsic2 5y ago
      I think the point of all this is, don't put the cart before horse. Money is a byproduct of what you do to enrich peoples lives. If you put money first, people suffer, and businesses end up suffering in the long run. If you put enriching lives first, real people want to compensate you, hell its kind of unspoken/unconscious law not to take advantage of people that create things that improve life. I can't count how many times I decided to compensate people that made software that enriched my life, not because the asked for it, but because they made something that deserves compensation.
- sschueller 5y ago
- kevingadd 5y ago
  If my profit comes at the cost of your profit eventually things are going to disintegrate. If you optimize for profit aggressively you can end up making decisions that maximize short term profit but destroy the long term viability of your business (or the entire market) For example, Zynga's leadership eventually realized they were salting the earth and ensuring that in the future their genre/model wouldn't work anymore. They did it anyway. They've owned up to this
- simion314 5y ago
  >Aren't we all maximizing our profit? Isn't that kind of the point of being in business? The full sentence is maximize profit no matter anything else, like profit first , honesty later, family later, friends later, happiness later , health later. Not everyone gets off by increasing some numbers, sometime there is enough.
  - throw14082020 5y ago
    But once a company is public, then maximising profit is really the only goal. If you don't do that as a CEO, aren't you being negligent (doing something illegal).
    - flyinglizard 5y ago
      There are many faces to profit. Amazon didn’t turn a profit for twenty years but no one would say Jeff Bezos was negligent. It is more accurate to say that CEOs need to create value. Even then, value can be at one point (liquidate all company assets) or oriented towards the distant future (invest in nuclear fusion tech).
    - bruce511 5y ago
      That really is a myth that needs to die.
      - colinmhayes 5y ago
        No it's really not. Thinking that it means "maximising short term profit is really the only goal" is a myth that needs to die, but maximising net discounted profit is really the only goal of public companies.
        wtetzner 5y ago
        They're obligated to act in the interest of shareholders. That usually means profits, but could very well be other things.
- bruce511 5y ago
  It's almost never good business to optimise for profit. Or, perhaps more accurately to optimise for short term profit. For example I can maximise profit by firing all the staff, but continuing to collect subscription revenue for a couple years. Lots of profit, perhaps even "more profit", but a dead business. We spend money on all sorts of things, at the cost of immediate profit. Staff bonuses, end-of-year lunch, social donations, R&D, all come off the bottom line. Now, you can argue that we do it to stay in business, and a business that exists infanitly creates infinite profit, in which case the goal of business is to stay in business. Or perhaps profit is best served by keeping staff forever, in which case the odd benefit increases profit. Profit is important, without it a business will fail - but if that's the _only_ metric then its a very cold unpleasant place to work.
- jonshariat 5y ago
  It's about shifting the cost of growth to other things like employee health, environment, users, etc that is the problem.
- neolefty 5y ago
  Taken to certain extremes, yes it is a bad thing. In moderation — for example if you take a wholistic view that incorporates benefit to the society at large as well, then it can be very good.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
The iPhone is only valuable because of developers. If they all coordinated together, they could get apple to change. Imagine all the apps breaking one day…
- lancesells 5y ago
  It's a symbiotic relationship. They both serve each other. Things could always be better and Apple is not a good guy but I doubt any large app or organization is either.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- asperous 5y ago
  If all apps go on strike, an app that crosses the picket line gets all the revenue in their market. This is related to the economic term "cartel", and why they are unstable in practice.
  - Iolaum 5y ago
    in practice? Instead of posting anecdotal evidence of mine to the contrary, I ll ask the following. If cartels are unstable in practice, then why do states need competition authorities to punish price fixing, and similar practices? I 'd say cartel's are unstable in theory but not necessarily in practice.
    - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
      Yeah, I would argue that almost every market/segment in America is dominated by a cartel or monopoly. Even things like commodities have hidden cartels and monopolies. Oil may be a commodity, but the refining facilities are most certainly cartel-owned. Agriculture is seemingly not a cartel, but ADM and Cargill dominate certain aspects of the supply chain and processing. Instead I would argue that iterative game theory of free market economics would stabilize to a cartel or monopoly. Once one of the open competitors determines an advantage, and/or has substantial access to near-free capital (um, what's the interest rate of the last two decades?), then they can acquire their competitors. Then they can apply barriers to entry such as regulation and lockin contracts with equipment suppliers and the like. Look at the practices of Intel to lockout AMD. Look at how Microsoft exerted power on PC makers. Once you are big, you can influence the suppliers and distributors to lockout competitors. As long as size is an intimidator (and it almost always will be except to extreme examples of markets), it will be effective. The only time it helps is when it slows response until an upstart using an entirely different supply chain and technology (like Tesla) gains such a fundamental advantage they can't stamp it out.
anonymouse008 5y ago
Discussion: if the profit is 'monopolistic' and primarily rent seeking, then why hasn't any other company been able to produce hardware at parity while producing developer tools to make apps on par with competent developers on iOS? It feels like there is so much work that goes into the Apple ecosystem working so cleanly, that most take it for granted without considering what is really an 'alternative' and its costs.
- onion2k 5y ago
  There's a great article about how hardware companies can't compete with Apple. Apple do things like finding a technology for making better laptop enclosures and buying the company that makes it so no one else can use it. It's a good read. https://beneinstein.medium.com/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like-apple-does-93bea02a3bbf https://beneinstein.medium.com/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-...
  - lelandfe 5y ago
    It looks like the article focuses much more on how the processes Apple employs are expensive, laborious, and challenging – which make them difficult to replicate. > Pretty much no company, big or small, can afford to do these things. Yes, Apple has done a great job building many of these products and yes, consumers have come to love many of these difficult-to-manufacture features. But you are not Apple
    - stevehawk 5y ago
      It started about fifteen years ago, but Apple discovered that a great use for their extra cash flow was to buy up the processes they (and their competitors) would need in the future. When a screen manufacturer needed money to do the next big thing, then Apple would chip in significant funding and own a percentage of the new joint venture. They would not only get priority and lower prices on orders, but they profited from anyone else buying the same tech. Apple now owns an exclusive license to Liquidmetal, is a significant investor in Corning (Gorilla Glass), invested heavily in a Toshiba LCD plant, paid LG (for LCD) and various SSD manufacturers massive upfront payments for priority and/or exclusivity.
makecheck 5y ago
Apple likes to highlight all the ways their actions benefit developers, while ignoring all the ways their actions harm developers. Well if you get to add money to your bottom line for all the great stuff you do, you should also have to subtract money for all the crappy things you do. Off the top of my head: - Developers should get a “cut” whenever Apple makes arbitrary changes that completely break 3rd-party apps. If the app’s code doesn’t change but Apple does change something, their behavior is literally creating problems for developers with no cost to Apple. Let’s charge them! - Developers should get a “cut” whenever Apple is literally the reason for delay when trying to deliver things like critical fixes to customers. Let’s charge them! - Developers should get a “cut” whenever their reputation is completely trashed by users because Apple refuses to acknowledge their own mistakes. In other words, Apple is perfectly happy to let users think apps are trash, even if the reason for the problem is Apple. Let’s charge them! Apple doesn’t get to have only the good parts. I personally am sick and tired of all the ways they get to hide their awful behavior, and forcing developers to take the brunt of it.
- donquixote25 5y ago
  None those will ever happen unless developers/app companies for a union of some sort.
  - pooper 5y ago
    I see no way Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Uber, ... would join such a union. And if they did, would they have way too much influence on the union?
    - donquixote25 5y ago
      That's true. I guess if all the app developers pulled their apps out of the app store, the larger companies could just come in with their own version of all the apps.
- lelandfe 5y ago
  Charging for API compatibility issues sounds like a dangerous precedent.
mchaynes 5y ago
The profit motive corrupts all. We need to kill capitalism in its current form for these companies to stop being terrible and evil. There are constant articles on HN about why <insert big company> is doing <terrible monopolistic thing>, and we inevitably talk about how these companies are doing horrible things, while others then go on to say “well look at all the value they’re bringing”. As if both can’t be true at once. It’s an embarrassingly reductive back and forth. These companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximize the stock price. This inevitably leads to this behavior. Of course, everyone on this site secretly wants to build the “next big thing” so they can get famous and incredibly wealthy. You can only become that rich under the current system, so instead of just understanding the fundamental reasons why we see this behavior again and again and again, we bicker about the finer points of governance of these corporations. It’s like arguing about what size bandaid to put over a gaping chest wound. This site is full of smart people, but our collective greed makes us seem pretty damn stupid
- politician 5y ago
  Can you suggest something less drastic than eliminate capitalism? For example, “enforce existing anti—trust regulation”. Tossing out a system that basically works in the hopes that a complete rewrite will solve all of our problems never works.
  - kchameleon1234 5y ago
    > Tossing out a system that basically works in the hopes that a complete rewrite will solve all of our problems never works Does it "basically work" though? You are, for example, aware that profit motives have driven things like: - the water crisis in Flint, Michigan; - the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States and its allies in the early 2000s; - the ongoing destruction of the Amazon rainforest (and the genocide that continues to go hand in hand with it) by ranchers seeking to increase their bottom line; - the instance by airlines to continue flying completely empty planes all over the EU "to keep takeoff and landing times"; - the refusal to pass a TRIPS waiver for the mRNA COVID vaccine that prevents much of the world from accessing the most effective vaccines in a timely manner (or at all); - the ongoing exploitation and perpetuation of underpaid or outright slave labor in many parts of the world by countries proped up by western colonial powers intent on delivering luxury items to their citizens at relatively low costs (while still reaping massive profits off those sales); - etc, etc, etc. I don't disagree that we need some intermediate solution like enforcing existing anti-trust legislation, repealing anti-union restrictions that outlaw effective labor organizing techniques, actually enacting harsh and swift consequences on companies that continue to destroy the environment (and the people who live in it). But those are only short term solutions to immediate harms being perpetuated by a system that has for well over a century brought death and destruction to the earth and its people... not to mention what capitalism's ancestors did in the never-ending, blood-thirsty western colonial expansion throughout the globe. So yes, let's enforce anti-trust laws... but let's not do that and think that alone will solve the myriad problems that have been thrust upon the peoples of the earth by a small number of extremely rich, profit driven people. And let's definitely not claim that the system that props up and perpetuates that behavior "basically works" when for most of the people of the world it patently does not "basically work". I don't know what the ideal system is. I have my own utopian visions but I acknowledge they'll likely never come to pass. But we _have_ to try something different than what we're doing now. The current global economic trajectory is a deathwish that most people have not consented to. (Edited to fix list formatting)
systemvoltage 5y ago
Surprising how little attention this story got: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chinese-authorities-apple-ceo-signed-275-billion-deal-with-them https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chine... AFAIK, it was not in the mainstream media. Perhaps The Information credibility is an issue?
hughrr 5y ago
As an end user and developer I don’t care. They produce a huge market customers care about, high quality experience on the software and hardware front and mostly do the right thing. You can always choose not to participate if these things are a problem for you. They are not a monopoly in their sector nor are they required to participate in society.
- kelnos 5y ago
  > You can always choose not to participate if these things are a problem for you. Not always. Consider what would happen in the US if Uber decided they didn't want to participate anymore. Uber fails, and Lyft wins. This holds for companies like Spotify, Yelp, any messaging platform, food delivery, video streaming... Sure, if you're an indie developer whose revenue doesn't depend on being on mobile platforms, this might not be a problem for you. But anything where a mobile experience is important to your revenue (or even your continued existence), you must be in the App Store (and the Play Store).
snowwrestler 5y ago
> When Apple introduced the iPhone, it didn’t have an App Store. From the moment the iPhone was announced, everyone speculated that it was only a matter of time until one was created, and a bit more than a year later, Apple announced it would allow developers to create iPhone apps and sell them in the App Store. This is not exactly accurate. Everyone speculated about an SDK (like for the Mac). When it was finally announced, the locked-down “App Store” aspect of it was a surprise. And it was generally greeted positively; after all, at the time it was pretty hard and expensive to go to market with new client-side software. Websites were way easier, and in fact that is one reason Apple initially were all-in on web apps for the iPhone. (There were also honest concerns whether Apple had the chops to adequately secure a phone SDK so that calls would always work.) The bad feelings about it built over time. One could say that people have started taking the existence of the iOS ecosystem for granted. But the world has changed around Apple. It no longer looks hard to go to market with software, so people no longer think Apple’s cut is fair. And I think the article is correct that Apple has increasingly viewed it as a tax, not pass-thru expense.
- ksec 5y ago
  >The bad feelings about it built over time. The iPhone today is so much different to the iPhone in Steve Jobs era. iPhone 4 only had a 3.5" Screen. All the decisions during early iPhone era make sense. It was a phone like an appliance with some apps, and an internet communicator. It wasn't a Gaming platform that makes more money than console, nor a content consumption devices that exceed even TV, or a security or payment system used in everyday modern society. Or in every other scenario in our society which increasingly "assumes" you have a Smartphone. I think they are applying the same rules on iPhone in a completely different situation and scenario. Which is why all the bad feeling built over time.
ksec 5y ago
Only entrepreneur understand this. "Manage the top line: your strategy, your people, and your products, and the bottom line will follow." - Steve Jobs Most managers or CEOs just dont get it. They are always looking at their bottom line. Edit: I just notice this quote has the word strategy in it, which is strange because Silicon Valley VC BS suggest "execution eats strategy for breakfast".

100 points by carlycue 5y ago

You say "profit is always the priority" like its a bad thing. Aren't we all maximizing our profit? Isn't that kind of the point of being in business?

pfortuny 5y ago
Nope. Lots of people stay in business because they just like it AND it gives enough money for a reasonable life.
- djbebs 5y ago
  What makes you think their enjoyment isn't profit?
  - spiderice 5y ago
    No one is saying it isn't. But that's clearly not what is being discussed here. This is just changing the definition mid argument.
  - trinsic2 5y ago
    I think the point of all this is, don't put the cart before horse. Money is a byproduct of what you do to enrich peoples lives. If you put money first, people suffer, and businesses end up suffering in the long run. If you put enriching lives first, real people want to compensate you, hell its kind of unspoken/unconscious law not to take advantage of people that create things that improve life. I can't count how many times I decided to compensate people that made software that enriched my life, not because the asked for it, but because they made something that deserves compensation.
sschueller 5y ago
kevingadd 5y ago
If my profit comes at the cost of your profit eventually things are going to disintegrate. If you optimize for profit aggressively you can end up making decisions that maximize short term profit but destroy the long term viability of your business (or the entire market) For example, Zynga's leadership eventually realized they were salting the earth and ensuring that in the future their genre/model wouldn't work anymore. They did it anyway. They've owned up to this
simion314 5y ago
>Aren't we all maximizing our profit? Isn't that kind of the point of being in business? The full sentence is maximize profit no matter anything else, like profit first , honesty later, family later, friends later, happiness later , health later. Not everyone gets off by increasing some numbers, sometime there is enough.
- throw14082020 5y ago
  But once a company is public, then maximising profit is really the only goal. If you don't do that as a CEO, aren't you being negligent (doing something illegal).
  - flyinglizard 5y ago
    There are many faces to profit. Amazon didn’t turn a profit for twenty years but no one would say Jeff Bezos was negligent. It is more accurate to say that CEOs need to create value. Even then, value can be at one point (liquidate all company assets) or oriented towards the distant future (invest in nuclear fusion tech).
  - bruce511 5y ago
    That really is a myth that needs to die.
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      No it's really not. Thinking that it means "maximising short term profit is really the only goal" is a myth that needs to die, but maximising net discounted profit is really the only goal of public companies.
      - wtetzner 5y ago
        They're obligated to act in the interest of shareholders. That usually means profits, but could very well be other things.
bruce511 5y ago
It's almost never good business to optimise for profit. Or, perhaps more accurately to optimise for short term profit. For example I can maximise profit by firing all the staff, but continuing to collect subscription revenue for a couple years. Lots of profit, perhaps even "more profit", but a dead business. We spend money on all sorts of things, at the cost of immediate profit. Staff bonuses, end-of-year lunch, social donations, R&D, all come off the bottom line. Now, you can argue that we do it to stay in business, and a business that exists infanitly creates infinite profit, in which case the goal of business is to stay in business. Or perhaps profit is best served by keeping staff forever, in which case the odd benefit increases profit. Profit is important, without it a business will fail - but if that's the _only_ metric then its a very cold unpleasant place to work.
jonshariat 5y ago
It's about shifting the cost of growth to other things like employee health, environment, users, etc that is the problem.
neolefty 5y ago
Taken to certain extremes, yes it is a bad thing. In moderation — for example if you take a wholistic view that incorporates benefit to the society at large as well, then it can be very good.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

The iPhone is only valuable because of developers. If they all coordinated together, they could get apple to change. Imagine all the apps breaking one day…

lancesells 5y ago
It's a symbiotic relationship. They both serve each other. Things could always be better and Apple is not a good guy but I doubt any large app or organization is either.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
asperous 5y ago
If all apps go on strike, an app that crosses the picket line gets all the revenue in their market. This is related to the economic term "cartel", and why they are unstable in practice.
- Iolaum 5y ago
  in practice? Instead of posting anecdotal evidence of mine to the contrary, I ll ask the following. If cartels are unstable in practice, then why do states need competition authorities to punish price fixing, and similar practices? I 'd say cartel's are unstable in theory but not necessarily in practice.
  - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
    Yeah, I would argue that almost every market/segment in America is dominated by a cartel or monopoly. Even things like commodities have hidden cartels and monopolies. Oil may be a commodity, but the refining facilities are most certainly cartel-owned. Agriculture is seemingly not a cartel, but ADM and Cargill dominate certain aspects of the supply chain and processing. Instead I would argue that iterative game theory of free market economics would stabilize to a cartel or monopoly. Once one of the open competitors determines an advantage, and/or has substantial access to near-free capital (um, what's the interest rate of the last two decades?), then they can acquire their competitors. Then they can apply barriers to entry such as regulation and lockin contracts with equipment suppliers and the like. Look at the practices of Intel to lockout AMD. Look at how Microsoft exerted power on PC makers. Once you are big, you can influence the suppliers and distributors to lockout competitors. As long as size is an intimidator (and it almost always will be except to extreme examples of markets), it will be effective. The only time it helps is when it slows response until an upstart using an entirely different supply chain and technology (like Tesla) gains such a fundamental advantage they can't stamp it out.

anonymouse008 5y ago

Discussion: if the profit is 'monopolistic' and primarily rent seeking, then why hasn't any other company been able to produce hardware at parity while producing developer tools to make apps on par with competent developers on iOS? It feels like there is so much work that goes into the Apple ecosystem working so cleanly, that most take it for granted without considering what is really an 'alternative' and its costs.

onion2k 5y ago
There's a great article about how hardware companies can't compete with Apple. Apple do things like finding a technology for making better laptop enclosures and buying the company that makes it so no one else can use it. It's a good read. https://beneinstein.medium.com/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like-apple-does-93bea02a3bbf https://beneinstein.medium.com/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-...
- lelandfe 5y ago
  It looks like the article focuses much more on how the processes Apple employs are expensive, laborious, and challenging – which make them difficult to replicate. > Pretty much no company, big or small, can afford to do these things. Yes, Apple has done a great job building many of these products and yes, consumers have come to love many of these difficult-to-manufacture features. But you are not Apple
  - stevehawk 5y ago
    It started about fifteen years ago, but Apple discovered that a great use for their extra cash flow was to buy up the processes they (and their competitors) would need in the future. When a screen manufacturer needed money to do the next big thing, then Apple would chip in significant funding and own a percentage of the new joint venture. They would not only get priority and lower prices on orders, but they profited from anyone else buying the same tech. Apple now owns an exclusive license to Liquidmetal, is a significant investor in Corning (Gorilla Glass), invested heavily in a Toshiba LCD plant, paid LG (for LCD) and various SSD manufacturers massive upfront payments for priority and/or exclusivity.

makecheck 5y ago

Apple likes to highlight all the ways their actions benefit developers, while ignoring all the ways their actions harm developers. Well if you get to add money to your bottom line for all the great stuff you do, you should also have to subtract money for all the crappy things you do. Off the top of my head: - Developers should get a “cut” whenever Apple makes arbitrary changes that completely break 3rd-party apps. If the app’s code doesn’t change but Apple does change something, their behavior is literally creating problems for developers with no cost to Apple. Let’s charge them! - Developers should get a “cut” whenever Apple is literally the reason for delay when trying to deliver things like critical fixes to customers. Let’s charge them! - Developers should get a “cut” whenever their reputation is completely trashed by users because Apple refuses to acknowledge their own mistakes. In other words, Apple is perfectly happy to let users think apps are trash, even if the reason for the problem is Apple. Let’s charge them! Apple doesn’t get to have only the good parts. I personally am sick and tired of all the ways they get to hide their awful behavior, and forcing developers to take the brunt of it.

donquixote25 5y ago
None those will ever happen unless developers/app companies for a union of some sort.
- pooper 5y ago
  I see no way Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Uber, ... would join such a union. And if they did, would they have way too much influence on the union?
  - donquixote25 5y ago
    That's true. I guess if all the app developers pulled their apps out of the app store, the larger companies could just come in with their own version of all the apps.
lelandfe 5y ago
Charging for API compatibility issues sounds like a dangerous precedent.

mchaynes 5y ago

The profit motive corrupts all. We need to kill capitalism in its current form for these companies to stop being terrible and evil. There are constant articles on HN about why <insert big company> is doing <terrible monopolistic thing>, and we inevitably talk about how these companies are doing horrible things, while others then go on to say “well look at all the value they’re bringing”. As if both can’t be true at once. It’s an embarrassingly reductive back and forth. These companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximize the stock price. This inevitably leads to this behavior. Of course, everyone on this site secretly wants to build the “next big thing” so they can get famous and incredibly wealthy. You can only become that rich under the current system, so instead of just understanding the fundamental reasons why we see this behavior again and again and again, we bicker about the finer points of governance of these corporations. It’s like arguing about what size bandaid to put over a gaping chest wound. This site is full of smart people, but our collective greed makes us seem pretty damn stupid

politician 5y ago
Can you suggest something less drastic than eliminate capitalism? For example, “enforce existing anti—trust regulation”. Tossing out a system that basically works in the hopes that a complete rewrite will solve all of our problems never works.
- kchameleon1234 5y ago
  > Tossing out a system that basically works in the hopes that a complete rewrite will solve all of our problems never works Does it "basically work" though? You are, for example, aware that profit motives have driven things like: - the water crisis in Flint, Michigan; - the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States and its allies in the early 2000s; - the ongoing destruction of the Amazon rainforest (and the genocide that continues to go hand in hand with it) by ranchers seeking to increase their bottom line; - the instance by airlines to continue flying completely empty planes all over the EU "to keep takeoff and landing times"; - the refusal to pass a TRIPS waiver for the mRNA COVID vaccine that prevents much of the world from accessing the most effective vaccines in a timely manner (or at all); - the ongoing exploitation and perpetuation of underpaid or outright slave labor in many parts of the world by countries proped up by western colonial powers intent on delivering luxury items to their citizens at relatively low costs (while still reaping massive profits off those sales); - etc, etc, etc. I don't disagree that we need some intermediate solution like enforcing existing anti-trust legislation, repealing anti-union restrictions that outlaw effective labor organizing techniques, actually enacting harsh and swift consequences on companies that continue to destroy the environment (and the people who live in it). But those are only short term solutions to immediate harms being perpetuated by a system that has for well over a century brought death and destruction to the earth and its people... not to mention what capitalism's ancestors did in the never-ending, blood-thirsty western colonial expansion throughout the globe. So yes, let's enforce anti-trust laws... but let's not do that and think that alone will solve the myriad problems that have been thrust upon the peoples of the earth by a small number of extremely rich, profit driven people. And let's definitely not claim that the system that props up and perpetuates that behavior "basically works" when for most of the people of the world it patently does not "basically work". I don't know what the ideal system is. I have my own utopian visions but I acknowledge they'll likely never come to pass. But we _have_ to try something different than what we're doing now. The current global economic trajectory is a deathwish that most people have not consented to. (Edited to fix list formatting)

systemvoltage 5y ago

Surprising how little attention this story got: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chinese-authorities-apple-ceo-signed-275-billion-deal-with-them https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chine... AFAIK, it was not in the mainstream media. Perhaps The Information credibility is an issue?

hughrr 5y ago

As an end user and developer I don’t care. They produce a huge market customers care about, high quality experience on the software and hardware front and mostly do the right thing. You can always choose not to participate if these things are a problem for you. They are not a monopoly in their sector nor are they required to participate in society.

kelnos 5y ago
> You can always choose not to participate if these things are a problem for you. Not always. Consider what would happen in the US if Uber decided they didn't want to participate anymore. Uber fails, and Lyft wins. This holds for companies like Spotify, Yelp, any messaging platform, food delivery, video streaming... Sure, if you're an indie developer whose revenue doesn't depend on being on mobile platforms, this might not be a problem for you. But anything where a mobile experience is important to your revenue (or even your continued existence), you must be in the App Store (and the Play Store).

snowwrestler 5y ago

> When Apple introduced the iPhone, it didn’t have an App Store. From the moment the iPhone was announced, everyone speculated that it was only a matter of time until one was created, and a bit more than a year later, Apple announced it would allow developers to create iPhone apps and sell them in the App Store. This is not exactly accurate. Everyone speculated about an SDK (like for the Mac). When it was finally announced, the locked-down “App Store” aspect of it was a surprise. And it was generally greeted positively; after all, at the time it was pretty hard and expensive to go to market with new client-side software. Websites were way easier, and in fact that is one reason Apple initially were all-in on web apps for the iPhone. (There were also honest concerns whether Apple had the chops to adequately secure a phone SDK so that calls would always work.) The bad feelings about it built over time. One could say that people have started taking the existence of the iOS ecosystem for granted. But the world has changed around Apple. It no longer looks hard to go to market with software, so people no longer think Apple’s cut is fair. And I think the article is correct that Apple has increasingly viewed it as a tax, not pass-thru expense.

ksec 5y ago
>The bad feelings about it built over time. The iPhone today is so much different to the iPhone in Steve Jobs era. iPhone 4 only had a 3.5" Screen. All the decisions during early iPhone era make sense. It was a phone like an appliance with some apps, and an internet communicator. It wasn't a Gaming platform that makes more money than console, nor a content consumption devices that exceed even TV, or a security or payment system used in everyday modern society. Or in every other scenario in our society which increasingly "assumes" you have a Smartphone. I think they are applying the same rules on iPhone in a completely different situation and scenario. Which is why all the bad feeling built over time.

ksec 5y ago

Only entrepreneur understand this. "Manage the top line: your strategy, your people, and your products, and the bottom line will follow." - Steve Jobs Most managers or CEOs just dont get it. They are always looking at their bottom line. Edit: I just notice this quote has the word strategy in it, which is strange because Silicon Valley VC BS suggest "execution eats strategy for breakfast".