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The subtext to all of the changes mega corps are making is that they are slaves to their investment pipelines and now that profits are not showing growth, they'

The subtext to all of the changes mega corps are making is that they are slaves to their investment pipelines and now that profits are not showing growth, they're turning towards even more unreasonable tactics of squeezing money out of exactly what makes them an ecosystem... They're milking their user base, they're milking developers, they're milking everyone to stay on top. Only companies that start to really evaluate how they can free themselves from the pipeline of dependency will survive. It means going back to browser-based apps and services, not in creating apps that need to be deployed through gatekeeping app stores.

jolux 5y ago
Apple's profits from hardware are still growing though.
- lmm 5y ago
  IIRC their profits are growing but sales are shrinking. They're soaking those who do buy harder and harder.
  - jolux 5y ago
    Hmmm, I don't know that their sales are shrinking. They're definitely increasing their margin on the higher-end devices though.
EGreg 5y ago
Yes! I have been speaking about this for a long while now. I felt I was a lone voice from among various left-libertarians here and there who criticize capitalism. The model of VCs buying shares and then selling them to Wall St. in an IPO leads to exactly this, across the board: Closed source software Siloed data Limited interoperability Extracting rents That last one is an economic term that requires a power imbalance to occur. Apple is just one of many Big Tech companies and, frankly, it is far more pro-consumer and pro-producer than say, Facebook and Google. The proliferation of ads on YouTube, the increasing attempts at surveillance capitalism, all point to diminishing returns from the ads. The system of funding “public utilities” privately and then dumping it on Wall St is eating itself. When something becomes that big, it should be turned into an open source project, and monetized using utility tokens. Open source, science, wikipedia, in the end unlock way more wealth than their closed counterparts based on the profit motive, private ownership and recouping investment. Take DisneyWorld for example. It is owned by Disney Coep which is owned by shareholders, who want DisneyWorld to extract profits at the expense of both its customers and vendors. Disney Dollars are the utility tokens that customers buy, while the vendors need to unionize to get $15 an hour minimum wage (or get Bernie to help LOL). The wall street shareholders are almost just a parasite class, who are just trying to push the company to give them profits ar the expense of its customers (eg Uber riders) and vendors (eg Uber drivers). There is a reason co-operative housing complexes in the USA don’t need rent control imposed by the city: the tenants ARE the landlord, so the prices of eg Mitchell-Lama housing in NYC is 2-5x smaller than its neighboring landlord-owned building. Private property works for small scales. For larger scales, open source gift economies work way better. Wikipedia is far bigger than Britannica, etc. We need the same approaches for news — and, I would argue, all public discourse. Corporations have co-opted many idealistic movements, including women’s liberation, and freedom of speech. We the people are being told what to argue about — deplatforming — rather than discuss how people got a platform in the first place. Having an unfiltered megaphone to tweet to 5 million people at 3am doesn’t help society, it hurts and divides it. Whether it’s Donald Trump or Elon Musk, the fart tweets don’t add much value to society but they can surely move markets and drive the population nuts, too. Science has peer review in journals, Open Source has review of pull requests, Wikipedia has talk pages, before publishing. And notice how much more balanced wikinews is, than the for-profit corporations that had to become clickbaity outlets that can only afford to report one side of a story, to pander to their readers (yes even the NYTimes and CNN have had to do this, forced by the market competition). Having an audience is a form of capital, which is why Republican arguments about Citizens United make sense: money and “speech” in favor of candidates are both very effective because the “speech” is really a top-down centralized ORGANIZATION where some owners set the agenda and the peons have to parrot it or get fired: Please see the Sinclair script here and the solution for freedom of speech: https://rational.app/ https://rational.app/ Corporatism hijacking women’s liberation movements: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286 Corporations and government keeping us all distracted: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362
- sjtindell 5y ago
  Really enjoy this take, thanks for the write up.

jolux 5y ago

Apple's profits from hardware are still growing though.

lmm 5y ago
IIRC their profits are growing but sales are shrinking. They're soaking those who do buy harder and harder.
- jolux 5y ago
  Hmmm, I don't know that their sales are shrinking. They're definitely increasing their margin on the higher-end devices though.

EGreg 5y ago

Yes! I have been speaking about this for a long while now. I felt I was a lone voice from among various left-libertarians here and there who criticize capitalism. The model of VCs buying shares and then selling them to Wall St. in an IPO leads to exactly this, across the board: Closed source software Siloed data Limited interoperability Extracting rents That last one is an economic term that requires a power imbalance to occur. Apple is just one of many Big Tech companies and, frankly, it is far more pro-consumer and pro-producer than say, Facebook and Google. The proliferation of ads on YouTube, the increasing attempts at surveillance capitalism, all point to diminishing returns from the ads. The system of funding “public utilities” privately and then dumping it on Wall St is eating itself. When something becomes that big, it should be turned into an open source project, and monetized using utility tokens. Open source, science, wikipedia, in the end unlock way more wealth than their closed counterparts based on the profit motive, private ownership and recouping investment. Take DisneyWorld for example. It is owned by Disney Coep which is owned by shareholders, who want DisneyWorld to extract profits at the expense of both its customers and vendors. Disney Dollars are the utility tokens that customers buy, while the vendors need to unionize to get $15 an hour minimum wage (or get Bernie to help LOL). The wall street shareholders are almost just a parasite class, who are just trying to push the company to give them profits ar the expense of its customers (eg Uber riders) and vendors (eg Uber drivers). There is a reason co-operative housing complexes in the USA don’t need rent control imposed by the city: the tenants ARE the landlord, so the prices of eg Mitchell-Lama housing in NYC is 2-5x smaller than its neighboring landlord-owned building. Private property works for small scales. For larger scales, open source gift economies work way better. Wikipedia is far bigger than Britannica, etc. We need the same approaches for news — and, I would argue, all public discourse. Corporations have co-opted many idealistic movements, including women’s liberation, and freedom of speech. We the people are being told what to argue about — deplatforming — rather than discuss how people got a platform in the first place. Having an unfiltered megaphone to tweet to 5 million people at 3am doesn’t help society, it hurts and divides it. Whether it’s Donald Trump or Elon Musk, the fart tweets don’t add much value to society but they can surely move markets and drive the population nuts, too. Science has peer review in journals, Open Source has review of pull requests, Wikipedia has talk pages, before publishing. And notice how much more balanced wikinews is, than the for-profit corporations that had to become clickbaity outlets that can only afford to report one side of a story, to pander to their readers (yes even the NYTimes and CNN have had to do this, forced by the market competition). Having an audience is a form of capital, which is why Republican arguments about Citizens United make sense: money and “speech” in favor of candidates are both very effective because the “speech” is really a top-down centralized ORGANIZATION where some owners set the agenda and the peons have to parrot it or get fired: Please see the Sinclair script here and the solution for freedom of speech: https://rational.app/ https://rational.app/ Corporatism hijacking women’s liberation movements: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286 Corporations and government keeping us all distracted: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362

sjtindell 5y ago
Really enjoy this take, thanks for the write up.