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February 12 - March 31, 2019
Imagine: a retailer that refuses to pay sales tax, treats its employees poorly, destroys hundreds of thousands of jobs, and yet is celebrated as a paragon of business innovation.
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A computer company that withholds information about a domestic act of terrorism from federal investigators,
@Apple
activates your phone as a listening device, and sells this information to Fortune 500 companies;
@Facebook
a 90 percent share of the most lucrative sector in media, yet avoids anticompetitive regulation
@Google
Apple fills two instinctual needs: to feel closer to God and be more attractive to the opposite sex.
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a low-cost product that sells for a premium price—Apple has become the most profitable company in history.
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In Q4 of 2016, Apple registered twice the net profits Amazon has produced, in total, since its founding
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Apple’s cash on hand is nearly the GDP of Denmark.11,12
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One of every six minutes online is spent on Facebook, and one in five minutes spent on mobile is on Facebook.
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In the last four years, April 1, 2013–April 1, 2017, the Four increased in value by approximately $1.3 trillion (GDP of Russia).
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Amazon’s fulfillment costs have grown 50 percent since Q1 2012.93 That’s not sustainable, unless Amazon can garner membership fees
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The sun has passed midday on the brand era.
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Death, for brands, has a name . . . Alexa.
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Ever notice that there are very few pictures of the inside of an Amazon warehouse?
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Amazon doesn’t talk publicly about robotics, one of its core competencies,
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In 2012, Amazon quietly acquired Kiva Systems, a sophisticated warehouse robotics firm, for $775 million.
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Entrepreneurs create jobs, right? No, they don’t.
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entrepreneurs, at least in tech, leverage processing power and bandwidth
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Amazon isn’t unique among the Four in this regard: all do more with less, and all put people out of work.
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Steve Jobs gave nothing to charity, almost exclusively hired middle-aged white guys, and was an awful person.
person. #macsucks
Steve Jobs became the innovation economy’s Jesus—and his shining achievement, the iPhone,
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Simply put, Apple in the Steve Jobs era got away with behavior—not least Jobs’s own actions regarding backdated stock options awarded to him by Apple8—that no other U.S. company CEO would have gotten away with. At some point, the American people, and the U.S. government, decided that Jobs and Apple were no longer constrained by law. Things remained that way until Mr. Jobs’s death.
It’s easy to forget now just how stunning Apple’s decade was. The iPod’s introduction, in late 2001 after the twin shocks of the bursting of the dot-com bubble and 9/11, played the same role as the Beatles’ appearance on Ed Sullivan just months after the Kennedy assassination:
Jobs used his Hollywood muscle to force an overreaction (that, of course, rewarded Apple) on the audio download piracy, started by Napster, that threatened to destroy the music industry. That set the stage for the masterpiece—the iPhone—that had Apple fanatics all over the world camping out in front of electronics stores. And finally, the sublime iPad. The unsung hero of Apple’s success is Napster founder Shawn Fanning, who scared the music industry into the arms of Apple, and who set about partnering with them similar to the way a vampire partners with a blood bag.
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Since men are wired to procreate aggressively, the caveman in us hungers for that Rolex, or Lamborghini—or Apple.
Apple
Luxury products make no sense on a rational level.
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Luxury is the market equivalent of feathers on a bird.
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the iPod was also a technological miracle—5GB of memory
Creative labs had a 6GB first I think @profgalloway
The iPhone is the clearest signal that you are closer to perfection and have more opportunities to mate.
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It doesn’t matter if the iconic founder was a jerk in real life. Apple proves this.
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The world needs more homes with engaged parents, not a better fucking phone.
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From 1997 to 2005 The Gap almost tripled in revenue, from $6.5 billion to $16.0 billion, while Levi Strauss & Co. sank from $6.9 billion to $4.1 billion.27,28,29,30 Brand building moved from the airwaves to the physical world, and Levi’s got caught flat-footed. I believe the world would be a better place had LS&Co. registered Apple-like success, as the Haas family (who own LS&Co.) is what you hope all business owners would be: modest, committed to the community, and generous. Steve Jobs brought Drexler onto Apple’s board of directors in 1999,
It wasn’t the iPhone, but the Apple Store, that defined Apple’s success.
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The global elite, by contrast, is a rainbow of the same damn color.
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The 500 stores, dropped into exclusive shopping districts in eighteen countries, draw more than 1 million worshippers every day.34 The Magic Kingdom only drew 20.5 million people total in 2015.35
Apple is one of the most profitable firms in history, but it doesn’t need to endure the nuisance of U.S. tax rates.
#taxes
I remind myself we (NYU) are charging kids $500/minute for me and a projector. This. Is. Fucking. Ridiculous.
Ridiculous
We at NYU brag how it’s become near impossible to gain admission to our school. This, in my view, is like a homeless shelter taking pride in how many people it turns away. Apple has the cash, brand, skills, and market opening to really dent the universe. Or . . . they could just make a better screen for their next phone.
Fake news stories are a far greater threat to our democracy than a few whack jobs wearing white hoods.
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by trashing fake stories, Facebook would also sacrifice billions of clicks and loads of revenue.
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A Facebook spokesperson, in the face of the controversy, said, “We cannot become arbiters of truth ourselves.”
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It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled.
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We click on impulse rather than forethought.
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The media scrutiny Facebook has endured creates an illusion of severe penalty. It isn’t.
#deleteFacebook
The platform has been weaponized; our faux outrage hasn’t translated to any tangible action, and it’s going to get worse.
#deleteFacebook
Yahoo shareholders paid $3 million so Ms. Mayer could appear in Vogue.
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Much of marketing is the art (disguised as science) of how to best change behavior.
#marketinggoals
accretive
