Upvoted b/c I think your rejection of Cringely is right, but the reason is different. Jobs/Apple are not in this for the money. They simply believe that iOS + cloud is a better way to compute.
Your comment feels like it is giving Jobs and Apple a bit more altruism than I think they deserve. They are absolutely in it for the money, but I think you are also right that they see this as a better way of computing: a way that can make computing better and easier for many people (who, in turn will give Apple more money).
It is a win-win for Aplle and the consumer, which is a great place for a company to be.
It's also true that even if you ascribe absolute altruism to Jobs and all the other stakeholders at Apple (which is a big leap), large revenues fuel their ability to do more R&D, take big risks, drive down costs to increase adoption of their cool tech, etc.
This is what I think motivates Steve Jobs: His insane passion for consumer computer electronics. Juicy and illuminating supporting fact: Jobs's first job was at the HP factory in Palo Alto at age 12. <http://www.playboy.com/articles/playboy-interview-steven-job...;
"I remember my first day, expressing my complete enthusiasm and bliss at being at Hewlett-Packard for the summer to my supervisor, a guy named Chris, telling him that my favorite thing in the whole world was electronics. I asked him what his favorite thing to do was and he looked at me and said, "To fuck!" [Laughs] I learned a lot that summer."
Every day he works, he energizes that little kid inside him. Not a bad life.
They simply believe that iOS + cloud is a better way to compute.
At WWDC. I won't say anything specific, but I'm beginning to think that Apple's business model is/has been to take all the awesome stuff that people developed in research labs since the 60's, and they're implementing it when/where it makes sense.
Basically, Apple has been in the business of arbitrage of R&D awesomeness. (As opposed to the most common use of R&D as a corporate epeen.) Considering there's decades of unimplemented (or badly implemented) good ideas, this seems like a sustainable model.
>take all the awesome stuff that people developed in research labs since the 60's, and they're implementing it when/where it makes sense.
If this is true, then that is also google's model, except they're doing it with server-side algorithms as opposed to UI implementations/hardware form factors.
You don't think google invented MapReduce, their translation algos, their vision algos, their concurrency models and so on? They get them out of research papers from years gone by. Then they implement them at real-world scale, and iterate them until they're suitably awesome, just like apple does with the ideas they resurrect from academia.
This is analogous to how every perceived leap forward in programming paradigms always seems to end up dating back to 1956.
I think you would see this pattern with every hugely successful company. Microsoft took the work that happened in the 70s to make personal computing possible and developed a business around it at the point it was ready for huge growth.
It is rarely good for a startup to be on the absolute bleeding edge of an industry, but if you can catch the tipping point[0] (and execute well), you have pretty much guaranteed success.
I think they believe it is best for consumers. But I also think that they understand that what is best for consumers is also best for their bottom line. It's naive to believe that the impact on the bottom line did not factor in.
Wow just wow. Maybe that's why they started paying Foxconn employees a few cents extra per iDevice so that they won't violate their employee agreement to not commit suicide? At least they have a job unlike non-employees, right?
There are a lot of examples of Apple's moneymindedness like margins on hardawre, upgrades cost, 30% of app cost etc. but the the most egregious is the 30% tithe on all in-app purchases and subscription content. The fact that they rejected Readability's app for the iPhone and iPad AFTER taking their FOSS code to implement the readability feature is Safari is one of the biggest examples of how Apple is squeezing the last bit of money. http://blog.readability.com/2011/02/an-open-letter-to-apple/
Oh, so now Apple pays salary for Foxconn employees? That's an interesting piece of news. How about HP, Cisco, Intel, Acer, Asus, Dell, Nokia, etc?
How is suicide rate among Foxconn employees compared to average?
Foxconn has had some problems, but didn't rank that poorly. It seems to be more a case of what life is like in China.
"In a survey published in 2010 by Oxfam Hong Kong, Foxconn ranked sixth for corporate social responsibility out of the 42 companies that then made up the Hang Seng index."
You can find other references to that raise by using a search engine.
You mean you have no control over a factory that you're the primary(or only) customer of?
>How about HP, Cisco, Intel, Acer, Asus, Dell, Nokia, etc?
I was replying to your GP post that stated that Apple and Jobs weren't after profit margins only. So you mean Apple is as mindlessly profit driven(if not more) as all those other companies you just listed? Thanks for proving my point. http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/06/02/foxconn-pay-rai...
> So you mean Apple is as mindlessly profit driven(if not
> more) as all those other companies you just listed?
No. Foxconn makes products not only for Apple, but for those and other companies too. Hence my question, why should Apple be responsible for the pay.
And Jobs' desire is not to improve experience for those making the products, but for those using them.
