If Tim Cook is willing to lie and cheat for extra revenue, I can't trust that Apple is honest about their privacy commitments. Services revenue line must keep going up, and their ad business is a growth opportunity.
This is a funny comment for me to read. Did anyone honestly think that Apple was touting privacy as anything other than a competitive advantage for revenue maximization? They've had things like iAd, their services revenue has grown massively as hardware sales plateau, and they are nowhere near as "private" in certain countries either.
One takeaway to startups that hope to stand for something even after tremendous growth and leadership changes: you have to build governance and accountability structures into your organizational DNA if you truly want specific values to persist over the long run.
Any relationship with a corporate entity is transactional in nature. A great deal of effort is often expended to manipulate us into feeling otherwise, but that is all it is.
Companies don't have feelings. They aren't conscious entities with a capacity for guilt or morality. They are, in essence, software applications designed to execute on systems composed of human employees. In a sense they are the original AI agents.
Every organizational design and structure has the potential to be subverted. Like cybersecurity, there are many tradeoffs to consider: continuity, adaptability, mission flexibility, and more. And they don’t exist in isolation. People are often going to seek influence and power one way or the other.
One more thing. Just because it is hard doesn’t mean we should work less hard on building organizations with durable values.
Companies are revenue maximizers, period. The ones that aren't quickly get displaced by ones that are.
The simpler test is to stay away from any company that has anything to gain by taking away your freedom. THAT unfortunately is most of them.
The depressing reality in consumer tech is that anything with a CPU doesn't belong to you, doesn't work for you, and will never do more than pretend to act in your best interest.
This explanatory model explains a lot of what companies do but not all. It is a useful first approximation for many firms.
Still, the conceit of modeling an organization as a rational individual only gets you so far. It works for certain levels of analysis, I will grant. But to build more detailed predictive models, more complexity is needed. For example, organizational inertia is a thing. One would be wise to factor in some mechanism for constrained rationality and/or “irrational” deviations. CEOs often move in herds, for example.
> The ones that aren't quickly get displaced by ones that are.
Theory, meet history. But more seriously, will you lay out what you mean by quickly? And what does market data show? Has this been studied empirically? (I’m aware that it is a theoretical consequence of some particular market theories — but I don’t think successful financial modelers would make that claim without getting much more specific.)
Little doubt AMD has something similar.
I personally believe that Apple is able to make different (better), choices in the name of a consumer privacy, than Google will.
Android is built from the ground up to provide surveillance data to Google-controlled adtech - that's their revenue model. I don't begrudge them that, people should have choice, etc. but the revenue model is adtech first and foremost.
Apple want services revenue, they like services revenue, but historically they're a vertically integrated tech platform manufacturer whose revenue model is building better platforms consumers want.
It's true that the services model may start to compromise that - and they've definitely started to make some poor choices they might need to pull back on to protect the core platform model - but I do think we're not comparing like with like when we say that Apple is no different to any other company in this space.
I've always read this and it seems well accepted. But I'm curious what exactly does it mean? What's Android sending to Google? Surely it's not logging what I click on apps? It's not logging what I click on my browser since the websites themselves send this info for ad purposes. So what's Android doing that let's say my Linux laptop isn't?
Edit: Answering my own question. There is a cross-app unique identifier (ignoring any privacy sandbox stuff) so developers and ad networks can get a consistent id across apps.
The key difference is user choice. An iOS user has no choice but to send their location data and app usage data to Apple. No such required privacy violations on Android.
I think they're more willing to build out privacy enhancing features than other companies that don't rely on surveillance capitalism to make their money. "Small" things like Filevault add up.
The single example that ascended to be the CEO of Apple though? That selection process would seem more relevant than any personal background.
My base assumption is that any impressions we have about Tim Cook (or any other executive of a company that size) are a carefully crafted artifact of marketing and PR. He may be a real person behind the scenes, but his (and everyone's) media persona is a fictional character he is portraying.
> any impressions we have about Tim Cook ... is a fictional character he is portraying
The relevant ones here are that he's gay, of a certain age, and from the South, and that he heads up a company who appear to invest heavily, over a long period of time, in privacy protections -- these all feel like they'd be easy to falsify if there existed evidence to the contrary.
My luke-warm take is that the advertising industry is inherently evil.
Why? I like using ad-supported services, and have found some life-changing products/services via targeted ads.
“They don’t want <bad thing> so they choose <equally bad thing good for their revenue>”
> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind,” he said, “I don't consider the bloody ROI.” He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.
> As evidenced by the use of “bloody” in his response—the closest thing to public profanity I've ever seen from Mr. Cook–it was clear that he was quite angry. His body language changed, his face contracted, and he spoke in rapid fire sentences compared to the usual metered and controlled way he speaks.
More broadly, I know that for-profit businesses are concerned with their bottom line, and I know businesses regularly throw other values under the bus in pursuit of profit. But I'm not sure it's possible to build a successful business (in terms of maintaining consumer trust, attracting and motivating decent employees, etc.) without some values beyond what's immediately quantifiable on the bottom line.
...and you believed him? I'm sorry, I'm trying to be less cynical in life, but he said exactly what people - apple fans - want to hear.
Is he above lying? We were just discussing how one of the apple executives straight up lied in court.
1. Cook only cares about pursuing profits, but at a shareholder meeting where shareholders were pressuring him to pursue profits, he lied to them (and had the presence of mind and acting chops to pretend to be uncharacteristically angry about it), because he believed that the story would get reported on and Apple fans would want to hear it, and he made the calculation that that would be more beneficial to his bottom line than being honest (or at least more politically neutral) with his shareholders.
2. Cook really does believe about accessibility, environmental issues, and worker safety, and he tries (or at least likes to think that he tries) to take steps toward those causes at the expense of profits, but he's also a complex and flawed mixture of motivations and is capable of compromising his values (and/or of letting those under him compromise their values) to varying degrees in the face of financial rewards or the pressures of the capitalist system.
#2 seems more likely and is more consistent with my view of humanity in general.
It's entirely possible that Cook was fully sincere then, but that over the subsequent 11 years, marinating in the toxic stew that is the upper echelons of American industry has eroded his principles and he is now more willing to listen to the voices pushing for money over all else (whether those voices are outside or inside his own head).
#1 seems more probable given a human being that has been selected to head one of the most valuable companies on the planet. That's his entire job -- to play a carefully crafted role for the public, the share holders and the media. He isn't paid to stand up at a shareholder meeting and let any sort of genuine feelings slip through, unless those feelings happen to be the right ones for that role at that moment.
Though that's the core issue, margins on services are just too addictive for big tech. Not sure Apple can keep its recipe for success with both services and hardware.
Oh, no! Who would have thought? What could we possibly do other than keep shoving money into their faces?
They were never serious.