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I agree, if the success was there they'd follow it.

But to be fair I think Steve Jobs was pretty interested in privacy and put some of that philosophy in the company. So they were already pursuing privacy goals but there would be these conflicts of interest that they would eventually have to resolve.

Luckily they continued to suck at social networking and many online things. It works better for them to double down on privacy.

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What if the causal relationship was reversed? Perhaps the success wasn't there in those areas due to a previously established philosophy concerning privacy.

Grasping and purely conjecture obviously, just putting it out there.

This seems reasonable to me. If the leadership decisions and the culture are a constant "drag" towards an organization being competitive in these areas, the organization will do badly at them, and be unable to compete. This can be seen as a feature rather than a bug, of course depending on where you sit.

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