What you're seeing in people's reactions is disappointment. No one's ever seen Microsoft as an ethical company, so no one bats an eye when they enter the Chinese market and embrace the questionable ethics of the Chinese government.
That doesn't make it right, but it certainly gets less attention.
They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle first for years and it gave them a leg up, now that they have abandoned that fall more for it.
[1] https://www.cultofmac.com/268413/tim-cook-tells-profit-obses...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy...
okay but honestly how silly is it to take a company's branding to heart? like are we all children that believe in santa claus too?
>do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time
i'm old enough now to understand that these two things are mutually exclusive because the latter necessarily involves exploitation (thereby doing net evil rather than net good).
Where companies get into ethical trouble is when they try to maintain exponential growth long after it is possible to do so in a way that is moral. You can make a lot of money doing good for the world, but you can't sustain exponential growth indefinitely without crossing a few lines.
economic growth is an abstraction. i'm not talking about abstract notions of good and evil.
some people believe that there are systems where entropy decreases too. their mistake is the same as yours: the system you're looking at isn't big enough. someone, somewhere, pays for your growth. either it's the employees that you underpay or it's the commons that you trash or it's the competitors whose coattails you're riding on or etc and etc and etc.
you can't point to a single product that doesn't incur this kind of entropy increase somewhere along its supply chain.
edit: i'm getting downvoted. would love to know where i'm mistaken (other than that i'm assailing capitalism).
And sometimes when people get rich, they add value to the world. The getting rich may be the goal, but it can also help other people too.
As a former employee it never really surprised me that the company would want to move back into China, but it did surprise me a bit that they were doing so under heavy secrecy. I suppose in practice they were right to want to keep it secret (employees were unhappy) but on the other hand it's impossible to keep secrets in that company so they should have known it would leak eventually.
Microsoft, Apple, etc. doing business in China is unsurprising in comparison since we all know what big tech companies with 10k+ employees are about: Making money.
Working there seemed to be Good.
Where as it was obvious with Apple's anti competitive policies, they'd be evil/corrupt. When they ban Apps, I don't bat an eye anymore.
You’ve got me on Apple though. And I say this as both a member of an Apple household and a longtime investor: It’s more or less a luxury good, it has cachet, people tie their egos to them, and we have the legacy of the Reality Distortion field that you can still see in the word choices in product launch events (and the fact that they are events).
People don’t want to believe Apple is evil like they don’t want to believe Michael touched kids inappropriately at Neverland.
They do some things domestically that make it Not My Problem... if you ignore the Hong Kong situation. But I am not empowered to fix my own government (save maybe at the local level) let alone someone else’s.
I’ve had a boss who tried to give out rewards to people and announced them without possessing them, and we had to harass him to get them. By the time they were delivered it felt like we’d earned them a second time, completely undermining whatever message he was trying to send.
The first “idiot” I worked for has the honor of my best anecdote for underestimating work and would pull this stunt where we could “go home early if we get everything done” on random Friday’s. On average we left an hour later on these days than on a typical Friday. The last time he tried this the entire team shot daggers at him and wandered back to their desks.
That's a hard lesson for a lot of people. Unfortunately it comes in different forms as well. I cant tell you how many places I've run across that seem to be paying slightly more than lip service to safety standards.
It’s the biggest reason I tell people to be magnanimous in interviews. You may need to interview them again in three years, or their friends. You don’t want them to tell you to fuck off, or worse, talking about you behind your back to their peers.
There’s a company in Seattle who had a long history of having trouble hiring. They even hosted a bunch of meetups but still got hardly any bites. Because they had a reputation as an awful place to work and people would talk about it after the meetups or even quietly during the meetups. I have my suspicions this actually hurt their lead rate instead of helped. Getting people together to air your dirty laundry is rarely good.
The second guy I talked to at Google was such an asshole that I doubted my read on the other three people. It shakes you, and me in particular. I have a problem with saying no to all offers on the table, which shows up as self-sabotage in interviews. I don’t want to work with you, so I’m not going to try to convince you to want to work with me. It would be better for me to stick with it and get comfortable just saying no to all bad offers even if that’s all the offers I have. Least objectionable has won out a time or two and I’ve always paid for it in the end.