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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

> This is how Steve laid out his plan to us at the ad agency when he returned to a nearly bankrupt Apple in the late 1990s. The customer experience was all-important.

Yes, it is a well-known truth that CX drives product success, and if you want to credit Jobs for that, fine.

But referencing back to the 90s because Jobs talked to you directly 25 years ago truly dilutes the message. It is really weird, honestly, to claim that a business strategy from decades ago when Apple was in a completely different reality is some sacrosanct policy that shall never be questioned.

I'm not saying the policy is wrong - I agree with it. So do most product managers I know. But all organizations change over time. Society changes. Tech changes. A viewpoint wherein you have "red lines" that cannot be challenged is short-sighted.

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> Society changes

It's rather disingenuous to claim, in context, that society has changed to enjoy advertisements. Indeed, I would make the argument that society will never, ever, get to the place where we enjoy advertising.

Advertising is like the value-added tax: horrific for everybody involved, and society would have killed it a long time ago for that reason, if it wasn't for how much money it makes.

To me, there’s a difference between ads that help me learn about brands or products, or make me laugh or have some positive emotion (Super Bowl ads, billboard signs, and movie previews come to mind) and ads that take over search results, interfere with the content I want to consume on an already-small screen, or are just distasteful to me. I can’t say I like ads but I recognize that I specifically dislike some ads more than others.

VAT is great, society worked a lot towards inventing it, and most countries are still trying hard to adopt some version of it while people entrenched in power resist the change.

Ads can be done right too, and have been done right plenty of times. If you want to nitpick the GP, do not create such a glass ceiling.

VAT is horrible. It's a regressive tax on consumption, so it's doubly economically inefficient and is the worst offender for reducing quality of life for the most people. Reductions in VAT rates are always populist, but governments refuse to pass them because they can't give up the revenue stream.

Citation very much needed on your part.

The only problem on VAT is that it's regressive. People studied sales taxes until they solved every single of their problems, except for this, that in inherent to the activity. It's also the least regressive form of commerce taxes around, and the easiest one to mess with and so the government can take the worst impacts away.

And if you pair it with a capital movement tax, you can make it proportional. But we don't have anything equivalently good for capital movement, so most governments refrain from it.

Either way, if you want to argue that VATs are bad because they only tax one part of economical activity, that's an incredibly bad argument.

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