Apple's Tribute to Jerome B. York | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Tribute to Jerome B. York

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Few corporations would have the guts to do the same. They are essentially trading money to pay homage to a member of the team. For this, they deserve a lot of respect.

agreed. the actual text of the message is also really honest and heartfelt.

How are they trading money? They removed a promo image of one of their products (probably the iPad), but the links up top are still there and anyone going to Apple today to buy a product will still buy the product. It's not like they took down the site.

By that same logic, you might as well put nothing in the center of the screen.

Whatever's in there usually gets them money, you can count on that.

Not that I think apple is thinking this (though they might be) but by putting this on their homepage they attract positive attention from the interweb and are cast in a very positive light. This in the long term leads to good branding and more sales.

Heartfelt condolences and good business can go hand in hand.

By your logic all witnessable acts of good must be viewed with suspicion. I don't disagree, but it's a hard way to approach the world.

> By your logic all witnessable acts of good must be viewed with suspicion.

Suspicion that they may be profitable? I think you have missed the point. The assertion in question is that Apple is losing money by hosting this tribute. It may be the case that Apple will instead make money. A critique regarding the philosophy of altruism seems a little premature...

The intent of my message was not to state that all witnessable acts of good must be viewed with suspicion. Rather, my goal was to express how acts of good could also be in one's (or in this case a companies) self-interest. I commend what apple did with their homepage.

That's the iNothing to you. Mine's already pre-ordered, with a spare battery and hose attachment.

Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products. We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are.

Jonathan Ive, SVP Industrial Design at Apple

If you want to able to design and develop good products you need to be vigilant with your money. What good is all that enthusiasm if you have no money to do all the developing and designing?

So thinking that Apple would spend money in a random and irrational manner even if this statement is completely true and the mantra every Apple employee says to herself or himself every morning is probably a bad assumption.

(I think that Apple’s frontpage doesn’t make them all that much money. I bet that if those who decided on doing this today were teleported to similar positions of responsibility within amazon they wouldn’t have done it. It still is a nice thing to do. You don’t even have to be all cynical about that, I certainly don’t want to. Apple is just the kind of company which – and that’s indeed pretty unique – can do stuff like that. They probably consciously made themselves into that kind of company.)

I bet that if those who decided on doing this today were teleported to similar positions of responsibility within amazon they wouldn’t have done it.

Then you don't know Apple all that well.

You're conflating money with opportunity cost. Apple operates with blatant disregard for incremental opportunity cost, because they believe that the greatest opportunity cost is the cost of doing something you don't believe in...

That's so well put and relevant to more than just Apple I wrote it down.

I guarantee you the person who decided to do this was Steve Jobs.

If you want to able to design and develop good products you need to be vigilant with your money.

This is true, but the point is that money isn't the primary goal. Money will follow if you achieve your first goal, which is to make and develop good products. When you are focused on money, you tend to cut corners. When you are focused on the product, you don't. This is why Apple products can have a slightly higher price, because they tend to not cut corners. Also, they are focused on products... which means that they have to be able to produce something that is sellable. So they don't spend money irrationally and make jewel encrusted computers... they just make well designed ones.

Very respectable that apple would change their whole homepage to pay tribute to someone they care deeply about passing away. Image how much money they are losing by not promoting their new products such as the iPad.

I doubt they are losing that much money. I'm not at all trying to detract from the sadness of such a loss, but there are links on the top that people can use, not to mention direct links from search engines taking them directly to where they need to go.

Don't doubt it, they are losing a significant portion of revenue-generating space on a commercial website in order to pay tribute to a fallen friend.

How about all the publicity they got from it for free? I'm sure visits to apple.com got a big bump today thanks to that. Apple.com is on the frontpage of every social sites right now (reddit, digg, hn etc).

Even with added traffic, the conversion rate (visitors/buyers) given the tribute and no products on the front page has to be extremely low. Low enough that I tend to believe they are losing money for the sake of this.

Apple is a company that has billions in cash. Any amount of money lost because of this won't do anything to their bottom line, something like 0.01% maybe less. The amount of free publicity and props they got from that action however are worth millions, I mean, just read what people are saying on this thread, they're all praising apple. How much do you think that's worth as publicity?

0.01% of billions is a lot of money.

To do noble and good things while following your business' charter: this is appropriate and an attractive goal for us businesspeople, if you ask me.

I imagine that they'll get a good amount of press out of this, which will (somewhat) negate their monetary losses here. That said, it's pretty obvious that this is a heartfelt message from the company, props to them for doing what most other companies rarely do and honoring the passing of an influential team member.

Jerome York is a great businessman to study. He was involved in some really fascinating turnarounds. After all, most businesses run into a few bumps along the way.

I think one of the more interesting ones was with GM, in 2006. Kirk Kerkorian had taken a stake in GM and asked York to be his advisor on the situation. York gave GM some frank news: they needed to be put into crisis mode, sell off Saab and Hummer, cut their dividend, and adopt meaningful restructuring goals a la Carlos Ghosn at Nissan.

Now -- GM rejected practically all of these.

They bought out some employees, yes. But they kept Hummer and Saab, when they should have sold them at peak earnings. Now they are trying to sell them at trough earnings to no avail. The dividend was kept in place and as a result, cash exited the business when it could have been used to pay down on debt. Then, on July 10, 2009, General Motors filed for bankruptcy.

This is incredible. The last time I remember them doing something like this was during the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

Oh, and in 2005: Rosa Parks. http://theappleblog.com/2005/10/26/think-different-rosa-park...

They did it for Al Gore too when he got one a Nobel - http://db.tidbits.com/resources/2007-10/Gore-on-apple.com.pn...

Did they also remove the bottom 3 ads for those? I thought they just changed the center image.

Pretty sure they did for some, at least: I specifically remember thinking "wow, they even took down the little 'ads', too". Not sure which, though.

And 2001 for George Harrison

"I'm Feeling Lucky" costs Google a lot of money too: http://hubpages.com/hub/Im-feeling-lucky-button-costs-Google...

Really classy

What was this man's role at Apple? The wiki doesn't say much.

whats the big deal? They didnt shut down the apple store. Its just the homepage....

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