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June 27, 2020 - May 22, 2022
OVER THE LAST TWENTY YEARS, four technology giants have inspired more joy, connections, prosperity, and discovery than any entity in history.
Noted. Not necessarily agreed.
Lori and 4 other people liked this
7,8,9,10Apple’s cash on hand is nearly the GDP of Denmark.11,12
Format this better, publisher. Do not need footnotes.
Appalling stat
About one out of six queries posed to the search engine have never been asked before.18 What rabbi, priest, scholar, or coach has so much gravitas that he or she is presented with that many questions never before asked of anybody? Who else inspires so many queries about the unknown from all corners of the world?
Isn't that astounding.
Petra X liked this
The Four are engaged in an epic race to become the operating system for our lives. The prize? A trillion-dollar valuation, and power and influence greater than any entity in history.
Which History teaches us will not be used to better anything except the owners' bottom line.
Consumption has taken the place of shared sacrifice during times of war and economic malaise. The nation needs you to keep buying more stuff.
2020 note: and now the PTB are willing to sacrifice your life to maintain it.
Nina ( picturetalk321 ) and 1 other person liked this
Amazon Marketplace now accounts for $40 billion, or 40 percent, of Amazon’s sales.33 Sellers, content with the massive customer flow, feel no compulsion to invest in retail channels of their own. Meanwhile, Amazon gets the data and can enter any business (begin selling products themselves) the moment a category becomes attractive. So, Amazon, should it choose, can begin offering directly “Old Asian Man Wall Decals,” “Nicolas Cage Pillowcases,” and “55-Gallon Drums of Lube.”
And Bezoslebub's trillions are fully explained.
This kind of experimentation and aggression is what the military calls the OODA loop: “observe, orient, decide, and act.” By acting quickly and decisively, you force the enemy—in this case, other retailers—to respond to your last maneuver as you’re entering the next one. In Amazon’s case, this was done with a ruthless focus on the consumer.
And consumers benefit...initially.
In 2016, Amazon was considered America’s most reputable firm.38
*snort*
And Alexa gets smarter every time you use it. That’s what the customer gets. For Amazon, the reward is greater: Amazon’s customers trust it so much that they’re allowing the company to listen in on their conversations and harvest their consumption data. This will give Amazon deeper penetration into the private lives and desires of consumers than any other company.
Orwellian night-fucking-mare...he typed on his Fire tablet
Leveraging big data and unrivaled knowledge of consumer purchasing patterns, Amazon will soon meet your need for stuff, without the friction of deciding or ordering. I call this concept Prime Squared. You may need to calibrate every once in a while—less stuff when you go on vacation, more when you’re having people over, less Lindt Chocolate when you fall out of love with it—but everything else will operate on retail’s equivalent of fly-by-wire. Your order will arrive with an empty box; you’ll put the stuff you don’t want in the return box, and Amazon will record your preferences. Next time,
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Frederik Pohl' novella THE MIDAS PLAGUE meets PKD's "Autofac".
Profits are to investors what heroin is to an addict. Investors love profits, I mean really love them. Yes, invest, grow, and innovate, but don’t dare get in the way of me getting jacked up on skag (profits).
That's as clear as anyone can be.
“How can we build the greatest advantage for the least amount of capital/investment?” Amazon reverses the question: “What can we do that gives us an advantage that’s hugely expensive, and that no one else can afford?”
And Bezos wins. No one *cares* that he loses often when his winners pay off (not out!) big.
As Bezos also wrote in that first annual letter: “Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”
Common sense. So rare in business.
Bernardo Garcia liked this
While year-to-year growth for Amazon’s retail business ranged from 13 percent to 20 percent from Q1 to Q3 2015, Amazon Web Services—the retailer’s network of servers and data storage technology—has grown 49 percent to 81 percent during that same interval. AWS also grew into a significant portion of Amazon’s total operating income, from 38 percent in Q1 2015 to 52 percent in Q3 2015.62 AWS generated $12.2 billion in sales by the end of Q3 2017 and profits of $1.17 billion (versus the company as a whole with $347 million).63 In other words, while the world still thinks of Amazon as a retailer,
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Key to its survival in 2020 plague terms.
Mr. Lore is Jeff Bezos’s brother by another mother. Or, if you’re a retail worker, they are the spawn of Ayn Rand and Darwin, raised by Darth Maul.
Yup
Ultimately, then, why should Amazon, the king of online retail, get into multichannel retail?88 Because e-commerce doesn’t work, isn’t economically viable, and no pure e-commerce firm will survive long term.
Iiiiinteresting!
Voice even further circumvents attributes that brands have spent generations and billions to build. With voice, consumers don’t know the price or see the packaging and are less likely to include the brand in their request. Fewer and fewer searches contain a brand name.94 Consumers are willing to price-compare several brands, and Amazon gives them just that opportunity. The death of brand, at the hand of Amazon, and in particular Alexa, can be foreshadowed in search queries.
2019 data via Adobe say 48% of searches are voice initiated.
searchengineland.com "Nine voice search stats to close out 2019"
When asked about job destruction and what it would mean for our society, he suggested one more time that we should consider adopting a universal minimum income. Or, he added, a negative income tax where every citizen is granted a cash payment that will be sufficient to stay above the poverty line.
Yes.
The wealthiest man in the twentieth century mastered the art of minimum-wage employees selling you stuff. The wealthiest man of the twenty-first century is mastering the science of zero-wage robots selling you stuff.
And the losers are workers.
What’s clear is that we need business leaders who envision, and enact, a future with more jobs—not billionaires who want the government to fund, with taxes they avoid, social programs for people to sit on their couches and watch Netflix all day. Jeff, show some real fucking vision.
Awomen.
For all the good that Jobs did for Apple, he was also a destructive force inside the company. He bullied employees; his attitudes around philanthropy and inclusiveness were small; his mercurial personality and megalomania kept Apple perpetually in borderline chaos. His death ended the company’s historic run of innovation, but it also let Apple, under Tim Cook, focus on predictability, profitability, and scale. You can see the results on the balance sheet: if profits are a sign of success, in fiscal year 2015 Apple was the most successful firm in history, registering $53.4 billion in net
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Scum, unfortunately, rises to the top.
Since men are wired to procreate aggressively, the caveman in us hungers for that Rolex, or Lamborghini—or Apple.
Perpetuating old, bad pseudoscience.
The 2015 debut of the Apple Watch closed the loop. Its introduction featured on stage a supermodel, Christy Turlington Burns. The cameras panned the audience for gratuitous cameos of famous people. And where did the company buy a seventeen-page spread to celebrate the new arrival? Not in Computer World, or even Time magazine (as they once had with the Macintosh). No, it was in Vogue. And it featured Peter Belanger photos of the rose-gold version, which sold for $12,000. The transformation was complete. Apple had become the best house in the best neighborhood.
And you idiot Appholes financed it
It’s easy to be cynical about bling and the frivolity of the sector. However, drive a Porsche 911, see your cheekbones pop with NARS Orgasm Blush, or find your gaze more intense, your objective more resolute, because you are the guy wearing Brunello Cucinelli. That’s why artisans have created more wealth than any cohort in modern history. “Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity,” said Coco Chanel.
Coco knew her oignons.
Yet when Jobs died, in 2011, the world mourned, with thousands posting shrines on the internet, at Apple headquarters, and company stores around the world—and even in front of his old high school. This marked the deification of the iconic founder, moving from stardom to sainthood—a shift made even easier by Jobs’s increasingly ascetic look in his final years.
Disgusting then, appalling now
It is conventional wisdom that Steve Jobs put “a dent in the universe.” No, he didn’t. Steve Jobs, in my view, spat on the universe. People who get up every morning, get their kids dressed, get them to school, and have an irrational passion for their kids’ well-being, dent the universe. The world needs more homes with engaged parents, not a better fucking phone.
Yes lawd! Preach!
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.
Yes. This.
These are captive channels. A $26,000 Cartier Ballon Bleu watch or a $5,000 suede Burberry trench coat would lose their luster on shelves at Macy’s. But stores operated by the brands become temples to the brand. Apple stores sell nearly $5,000 per square foot. Number 2 is a convenience store, which lags by 50 percent.33 It wasn’t the iPhone, but the Apple Store, that defined Apple’s success.
And still y'all walk into them to sacrifice $$ on the Altar to Jobs.
Fill a room with middle-class people from around the world, and you have diversity. They eat different food, wear different clothes, and can’t understand each other’s languages. It’s anthropology on parade. The global elite, by contrast, is a rainbow of the same damn color.
Which explains their unity in the face of all opposition.
Some Apple customers aren’t thrilled to learn that their purchases are based on irrational decisions. They think they’re smart and sophisticated.
You are dupes, fools, and enablers of the looting economy.
You used to be what you wore, and some now believe you are what you eat. But who you really are has become what you text on.
"Twitter for iPhone" on a tweet makes my lip curl, not my toes.
Apple likely has deeper moats than any firm in the world, and its status as a luxury brand will aid its longevity. While the other three companies, the alpha lions on the veldt of high-tech competition, still face the prospect of an early demise, only Apple has the potential to cheat death.
Which is why they need to be taxed & regulated into oblivion
My suggestion: Apple should launch the world’s largest tuition-free university.
Then give all the stock to the US treasury, then go to prison for slavery
Eighty-eight percent of kids from U.S. households in the top-income quintile will attend college, and only 8 percent from the lowest. We’re leaving the unremarkable and unwealthy—most people—behind in a civilization that is now more Hunger Games than civil.
This is by design of kakistocrats who run govt & economy
(the future of education will be a mix of off- and online),
He wrote this in 2015!
When you have the Facebook app open on your phone in the United States, Facebook is listening . . . and analyzing.
Why I won't use voice tech...once its on its on
Facebook tracks and records your browsing history, including after you’ve logged off its app.27 It also tracks your location history, based on wifi networks your phone has accessed.28 Even if you turn off your wifi, your telco knows what tower you are near and can sell that data to companies.29
Need i repeat?
Zuckerberg has been reluctant to implement GDPR data protections globally.
Then it should be forced on him at cattleprod-point
If Ford Motor announced they were concerned with the subterfuge of our democracy and were no longer going to advertise on Facebook, the Detroit firm would be commended for their actions in the media, and the market would promptly cut 10 percent off their share price.
Is that what happened as the Floyd Revolution forced them to do this?
If people make it clear, with their clicks, likes, and posts, that they hate certain things and love others, those people are easy to sell to. Clear as day. Easy as oil in Arabia.
Why ive opted out
The Facebook algorithm then proceeds to send me more liberal pieces, and the company will make money as I click on them. News feed visibility is based on four basic variables—creator, popularity, type of post, and date—plus its own ad algorithm.42 As I consume that content, whether it’s think pieces from the Guardian, YouTube clips of Elizabeth Warren expressing outrage at something, or my random friend venting about politics—the algorithm knows what to feed me because it has pegged me as a progressive.
Not rocket science
Moderates are hard to engage or predict. Picture a video with some guy in a cardigan sweater discussing, in a balanced tone, the pros and cons of free trade with Mexico. How many clicks would that get? Marketing to moderates is like fracking for gas. You only do it if the easier alternatives aren’t available. Thus, we are exposed to less and less calm, reasonable content.
Simple...what makes Zuck & the little Zuckling pigs richer?
This is how these algorithms reinforce polarization in our society. We may think of ourselves as rational creatures, but deep in our brain is the impulse for survival, and it divides the world into us vs. them. Anger and outrage are easily spiked. You can’t help yourself but click on that video of Richard Spencer getting punched. Politicians may seem extreme. But they are just responding to the public—and the anger we are working up daily in our news feeds, our march to one extreme.
So tax Zuck heavily
Respectable companies in the news business recognize their responsibility to the public and try to come to grips with their role in shaping the worldview of their customers. You know: editorial objectivity, fact-checking, journalistic ethics, civil discourse—all that kind of stuff. That’s a lot of work, and it dents profits.
I need to unswallow now.
BRB
But basically it’s the same MO as the other winners in the tech economy, and certainly the rest of the Four—foster a progressive brand among leadership, embrace multiculturalism, run the whole place on renewable energy—but, meanwhile, pursue a Darwinian, rapacious path to profits and ignore the job destruction taking place at your hands every day.
!!!
Facebook attempts to skirt criticism of its content by claiming it’s not a media outlet, but a platform. This sounds reasonable until you consider that the term platform was never meant to absolve companies from taking responsibility for the damage they do. What if McDonald’s, after discovering that 80 percent of their beef was fake and making us sick, proclaimed they couldn’t be held responsible, as they aren’t a fast-food restaurant but a fast-food platform? Would we tolerate that?
Probably
Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist and expert in how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities, compares social media notifications to slot machines.51 They both deliver variable rewards: you’re curious, will I have two Likes or two hundred? You click the app icon and wait for the wheels to turn—a second, two, three, piquing your anticipation only makes the reward sweeter: you have nineteen Likes. Will it be more in an hour? You’ll have to check to find out. And while you’re there, here are these fake news stories that bots have been littering the information space with.
Gross. All to make Them richer
The fulcrum is reverence for and maintenance of Facebook’s profit margins, versus ensuring the world’s largest media firm can’t be weaponized by our enemies. I know which side I’m on.
Yeup
The worship of innovators, the influence of billionaires, and the pace of technology create a potential perfect storm that, relatively speaking, is barely yet a warm breeze. With Facebook, it’s darkest before it’s pitch black. The platform has been weaponized; our faux outrage hasn’t translated to any tangible action, and it’s going to get worse.
2020 note: spot on!
