Tim Cook's Email to Employees About Apple's $1T Milestone

Fundraising and celebration is a related phenomena. I've sometimes noticed a lot of young first-time founders throw parties and celebrate having (investor) cash in the bank. Seems like folks with more experience tend to treat a successful fundraise as more of somebody else's money that you have to give back, and instead celebrate what they get done with that cash.

> At Netflix, the milestone we celebrated was subscriber numbers

I feel like this is the same trap that Facebook fell into. Celebrating subscribers is great until you top out.

Great point, may be personal life should also be like this. Instead of celebrating birthday or new year, you go all out on achieving personal milestones.

That sounds like a great way to create a toxic culture. A company is made up of human beings after all. God forbid a company has a social event among team mates that doesn't revolve around a performance metric.

In my opinion when the performance metrics are down is when you need the team building the most.

> It's interesting to me that Mr. Cook is downplaying this, but it makes some sense, since the price of the stock (and therefore the valuation) is only loosely tied to the success of the company.

Aren't these types of messages mostly meaningless? I mean, what is he going to say?

"Our stock price reflect our ability to continue to charge substantially more for our products than they cost to make. So I would like to thank our lawyers for making sure we aren't the ones who have to pay more taxes. The executive team at the other tech companies for helping us collude against our own employees so we don't have to pay them more. And our friends in China who keep a steady stream of low payed dormitory bound workers available so we don't have to spend our money in the US, or even much at all. Thank you all for helping us continuing these practices as the world burns."

I disagree. I think Tim recognizes that Steve's legacy has a mythic quality that people want to relate to.

Isn't it awesome that he's making good on a promise to take care of the business to then pass it on to the next CEO? What if it's an 8 yr old African child right now looking up to code Swift 4 on YouTube?

Steve Jobs is as much apart of the Apple brand as Walt Disney is part of Disney's.

Every culture has its myths, and in Apple's culture today, no myth is bigger than Steve Jobs. It might be wise of Cook to invoke Jobs at big moments.

He knows he's never going to match that legend... so why try? Instead of fighting it, he uses it to foster a common purpose within the company.

In terms of "maintaining" the business, Apple's share price when Cook became CEO seven years ago was about a quarter of what it is now. Pretty good maintenance.

Isn't that a bit like asking why the Christians are still talking about Jesus every Sunday instead of looking to the future?

It's recognition that Steve Job's vision was vindicated and his approach really did connect with customers.

On the consumer side, I don't want "standard devices". I want excellent hardware with excellent software, and I want it to just work. Apple isn't perfect here, but they're much better than their competition. I also like their stance on privacy, and the fact that their business model is aligned with their stance.

Also, didn't iTunes lead the charge to ditch DRM?

On the developer side, I'm an iOS dev. It might be frustrating that Apple doesn't make their toolchain available to you on a Linux box, but I'm actually really glad. It's complex and frustrating enough without them trying to support hobby developers on other platforms. This sounds harsh, but if you don't care about / enjoy Apple's platforms enough to spend $600 to develop on them, they probably are better off without you developing for those platforms.

Also, Apple doesn't generally "intentionally break code". They deprecate stuff all the time, which I appreciate both as a consumer and developer. It keeps the platform relatively cruft-free and ensures that I don't have to make my apps support iOS 1.0 through 12.0.

All of the above is generally my opinion, so if you're going to argue that I actually do want standard devices, or that I should want Apple dev on Linux, or that deprecating things on their platforms shouldn't be my preferred approach, don't bother.

So yes, I'm a fan of Apple, because I value things differently than you, and their actions align with my values.

The downvotes are because your comment does not address the content of the article in question. Instead, you have merely posted a generic criticism of Apple, going over the same old talking points we have all heard before. Thus, your comment does not constitute a quality contribution to this thread.

Non standard devices? Who makes those standards and why? I had a “standard” Windows computer for many years and it was driver hell. For almost any reasonably modern peripheral, I can plug it into my Mac and it works. Macs use “standard” USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports. Some other laptops still require dedicated and proprietary chargers. Lightning is proprietary, however, it’s only used for Apple devices, so that doesn’t make much difference. It isn’t like Apple requires lightning for third party external drives.

Internet Explorer was standard. Chrome has become a standard — both browsers got downright proprietary with all of their “standards.”

Have to buy a Mac to build your Mac/iOS apps? I don’t see what is so tragic about having to actually use the device for which you are developing. How can you run a Mac App on Windows or Linux? It seems like to even do basic testing you should be testing on Mac Harware. You can buy a brand new Mini for $499. Seems like a small price if you are a “professional” developer.

As far as intentionally breaking code, have you thought about why that happens? I assure you that there isn’t some secret group at Cupertino trying to figure out how best to annoy developers.

As far as “why Apple” — as an example, I have a 2010 iMac with 16GB RAM running High Sierra that is far more stable and reliable than a 2010 Dell running the latest Windows. That’s subjective, but the point is that Macs have a long lifespan and thus a high resale value.

Also privacy and security — Apple cares about it. They don’t always get it right, but how often have Macs or iOS been infected with malware compared to other platforms?

And there is UX. Macs are easier to use for most people that have tried them. iPhone satisfaction ratings are over 95%. That means something.

Of course Apple isn’t perfect, but find a piece of software or hardware that is — Apple gets things right far more than they get things wrong. Look at the various incarnations of Windows as a comparison and all the controversy they have generated.

Don’t like Apple? Don’t buy their stuff and stop trying to sell to people that do. You are free to go and sell wherever you want. As far as the Apple developer fee — if $99 per year is too expensive, then don’t pay it and go somewhere else. There are enough generic me-too apps on the store already. If you had something unique and valuable, you’d make plenty of money so that $99 would be insignificant anyway.

> why would anyone be a fan of such an aggressive company?

For all their faults, they brought personal computing quality out of the gutter and actually gave a fuck about UX.

To this day, you can't even reliably search for local files on a win10 system. They literally laid off their QA department.

You're getting downvotes because your criticism is off-base and completely unrelated to the point at hand. If you don't want to buy Apple products, don't buy them. That doesn't make them anti-consumer. If you don't want to spend the money to develop on the platforms, don't do it. Needing to own a part of the platform in order to develop for it is not anti-developer.

For most people that like Apple, both developer and consumer alike, there are pros that vastly outweigh any negatives. Developers, for example, make hundreds of times more income via Apple's platforms than they do off Android. The investment in the hardware is part of that. It's an investment. For consumers, it's an investment in a product that they feel is better for them.

Your criticisms are nothing more than opinions. They don't really belong here.

yep, he did it all alone. there was nobody else helping out. nobody at all.

Your pedantry is annoying. "PERSON DID THING on the belief" is a literary turn of phrase.

If they made their current net annual income for the entirety of their existence (not even close), then they would've needed to be taxed ~50% to have reached $1 trillion in taxes.

I get (or at least hope) that it's an exaggeration, but I'm not too keen on seemingly witty phrases without substance that get repeated everywhere.

How much has Apple paid? How about all the employees? Shareholders? How many millions of jobs has Apple created? I am pretty sure that the net economic value created by Apple has far outstripped any alleged deficiencies in they taxes.

And if you did tax them at 50% would they have innovated and hired as many people as they have? As a thought experiment, would Apple have been as successful if it were started in Paris rather than in a Los Altos garage? Why doesn’t Europe have more companies valued in the hundreds or billions? Why is there little Silicon Valley-style garage-based entrepreneurship in France? Culture is one aspect, but taxes and regulations are the primary reason. If you tax something, you get less of it.