Defend billion dollar tech companies at your peril. Competition is good for democracy and for consumers. Copy, acquire, kill sounds like something Facebook might say. Still, they are all at it whether they use this language or not. These companies are far too powerful. Especially Amazon and Google. Facebook or rotten. Apple are just greedy.
“Apple is just greedy”. By what moral authority do you make that statement? Who decides what Apple should charge for its products? You? Left wing twaddle never ceases to amaze me. Somehow you think Apple is obligated to price its products so the proletariat can afford them? What, you want profit regulation? Why not just go the distance and demand they be free of charge for everyone? It’s only fair, right?
Ireland expressed an opinion that Apple are greedy. S/he doesn't need to account for their own moral authority in order to have an opinion. Nor does the statement that Apple are greedy imply or dictate a pricing obligaion, or that profit should be regulated of that things should be given away for free. Right wing extrapolation twaddle never ceases to amaze me.
Can we at least complain about the improper subject-verb agreement?
someone should remind the Committee that they failed to bring the masters of this strategy before them. I'm talking about Microsoft.
They could start with phrases like 'the day isn't done until Lotus won't run'.
As has been said, Apple generally buy small companies. It is the likes of Microsoft (them again) that buy Skype, LinkedIn, gitHub etc.
and then proceed to [redacted] them up completely.
Putting barriers in the way of a company such as Apple from buying small companies will hit the retirement plans of a lot of startup CEO's really hard. A lot of them are just waiting for a fairy godmother to buy them out so that they can take the cash and head for the hills. Mind you any that we know about are probalby worth avoiding. It is the ones that keep under the media radar that are more interesting.
Small companies are actually where innovations come from. Small companies are agile, run by far less people, more nimble and have a creativity which fades as companies get larger. Buying up saplings will allows Apple's "tree" to hog all the daylight and make sure nothing will ever compete with it.
@rotateleftbyte isn't wrong. Many innovative start ups are able to get initial funding and momentum because of the expectation that they will be acquired and incorporated into one of a mega companies. If regulators are too heavy handed about allowing acquisitions we will probably see fewer small innovators and their innovations could have less (positive) impact. We're arguably better off when Apple incorporates into it's core platforms rather than "forcing" consumers to find and adopt them piecemeal from no-name niche firms.
We aren't generally in a purely competitive marketplace, but we're far from a traditional monopoly either. Competition in smart phones is intense. Neither Apple nor Microsoft have a monopoly on the desktop. Intel doesn't have a monopoly on CPUs. Amazon has a very dominant position in online retail, but let's see how long that lasts if they try to take advantage of that by raising prices (the primary concern about monopolies). If a monopolist has no market power to raise prices, are they really a monopolist?
Defend billion dollar tech companies at your peril. Competition is good for democracy and for consumers. Copy, acquire, kill sounds like something Facebook might say. Still, they are all at it whether they use this language or not. These companies are far too powerful. Especially Amazon and Google. Facebook or rotten. Apple are just greedy.
“Apple is just greedy”. By what moral authority do you make that statement? Who decides what Apple should charge for its products? You? Left wing twaddle never ceases to amaze me. Somehow you think Apple is obligated to price its products so the proletariat can afford them? What, you want profit regulation? Why not just go the distance and demand they be free of charge for everyone? It’s only fair, right?
Ireland expressed an opinion that Apple are greedy. S/he doesn't need to account for their own moral authority in order to have an opinion. Nor does the statement that Apple are greedy imply or dictate a pricing obligaion, or that profit should be regulated of that things should be given away for free. Right wing extrapolation twaddle never ceases to amaze me.
Can we at least complain about the improper subject-verb agreement?
That's a matter of perspective. Are you talking about Apple the singular legal entity, or Apple as a company of many people. I'm English, and we do things a bit different over here.
What’s wrong with that if the company pay a fair price? Isn’t this is what capitalism about?
Uh, no. The last time I checked, capitalism was about competition: more than one company offering the same products or services, not larger companies eliminating smaller ones. Sure, the owners of the acquired companies make money, but the cost to the consumer goes up because of the lack of competition.
As you said, the smaller companies CEO need the will to sell. They don’t have to sell it if they don’t want to. Most of these companies are small private companies that is not publicly trading. The owner has the absolute power of the company. It is not like Apple or google can hostile takeover at their will.
The CEO who is willing to sell to take the money, retired or to make something even bigger, like Jobs with Next or Elon with PayPal. What the CEOs choose to do is up to them.
About the choice for consumer, don’t we sometimes have too many choices already? Yes, you might argue in the market like photo editing or cell phone OS market has very little choice. But very often, it is the customer who is not willing to switch. Let’s just face it, it is just very hard to get things as refine as photoshop or iOS. You just can’t blamed the smaller companies’s failures because the bigger companies are too good.
Defend billion dollar tech companies at your peril. Competition is good for democracy and for consumers. Copy, acquire, kill sounds like something Facebook might say. Still, they are all at it whether they use this language or not. These companies are far too powerful. Especially Amazon and Google. Facebook or rotten. Apple are just greedy.
“Apple is just greedy”. By what moral authority do you make that statement? Who decides what Apple should charge for its products? You? Left wing twaddle never ceases to amaze me. Somehow you think Apple is obligated to price its products so the proletariat can afford them? What, you want profit regulation? Why not just go the distance and demand they be free of charge for everyone? It’s only fair, right?
Ireland expressed an opinion that Apple are greedy. S/he doesn't need to account for their own moral authority in order to have an opinion. Nor does the statement that Apple are greedy imply or dictate a pricing obligaion, or that profit should be regulated of that things should be given away for free. Right wing extrapolation twaddle never ceases to amaze me.
If you are referring to the EU Tax case, Ireland was on Apple's side and felt that they had paid their fair share. Ireland and Apple together fought the EU.
I don't quite understand where these questions are supposed to lead to. Regardless of what it is called, the idea of bigger companies buying or adopting the ideas and technologies of smaller ones is not new.
For example, let's take the Swype keyboard (that ability to swipe your finger around to type instead of tapping each button). It was a separate app, became part of core Android, and is now available within iOS as well.
Let's pretend that Swype is a far better method of entry than the old way. What is congress proposing be the proper handling here? Swype retains the only way to do such an action, no matter what? If Apple/Google can't copy the idea (with their own development so we aren't stealing their tech), then what? And if they can't buy them?
So where is the line? And what is the path that the Government is trying to say is the proper answer.
And stuff like that happens all the time. Some of the very foundational usage methods we know today stemmed from the same growth pattern. I don't think it is particularly wrong that things go like the above (and someone will inevitable abuse it given the chance); but how else is innovation supposed to be propelled and promoted?
Defend billion dollar tech companies at your peril. Competition is good for democracy and for consumers. Copy, acquire, kill sounds like something Facebook might say. Still, they are all at it whether they use this language or not. These companies are far too powerful. Especially Amazon and Google. Facebook or rotten. Apple are just greedy.
“Apple are just greedy”.
You have over 17k post on the forum. Very prolific.
Maybe you need to slow down and have time to think before you post such nonsense?
Defend billion dollar tech companies at your peril. Competition is good for democracy and for consumers. Copy, acquire, kill sounds like something Facebook might say. Still, they are all at it whether they use this language or not. These companies are far too powerful. Especially Amazon and Google. Facebook or rotten. Apple are just greedy.
“Apple is just greedy”. By what moral authority do you make that statement? Who decides what Apple should charge for its products? You? Left wing twaddle never ceases to amaze me. Somehow you think Apple is obligated to price its products so the proletariat can afford them? What, you want profit regulation? Why not just go the distance and demand they be free of charge for everyone? It’s only fair, right?
Ireland expressed an opinion that Apple are greedy. S/he doesn't need to account for their own moral authority in order to have an opinion. Nor does the statement that Apple are greedy imply or dictate a pricing obligaion, or that profit should be regulated of that things should be given away for free. Right wing extrapolation twaddle never ceases to amaze me.
If you are referring to the EU Tax case, Ireland was on Apple's side and felt that they had paid their fair share. Ireland and Apple together fought the EU.
I'm referring to the user of this forum Ireland who is quoted.
Comments
We aren't generally in a purely competitive marketplace, but we're far from a traditional monopoly either. Competition in smart phones is intense. Neither Apple nor Microsoft have a monopoly on the desktop. Intel doesn't have a monopoly on CPUs. Amazon has a very dominant position in online retail, but let's see how long that lasts if they try to take advantage of that by raising prices (the primary concern about monopolies). If a monopolist has no market power to raise prices, are they really a monopolist?
The CEO who is willing to sell to take the money, retired or to make something even bigger, like Jobs with Next or Elon with PayPal. What the CEOs choose to do is up to them.
For example, let's take the Swype keyboard (that ability to swipe your finger around to type instead of tapping each button). It was a separate app, became part of core Android, and is now available within iOS as well.
Let's pretend that Swype is a far better method of entry than the old way. What is congress proposing be the proper handling here? Swype retains the only way to do such an action, no matter what? If Apple/Google can't copy the idea (with their own development so we aren't stealing their tech), then what? And if they can't buy them?
So where is the line? And what is the path that the Government is trying to say is the proper answer.
And stuff like that happens all the time. Some of the very foundational usage methods we know today stemmed from the same growth pattern. I don't think it is particularly wrong that things go like the above (and someone will inevitable abuse it given the chance); but how else is innovation supposed to be propelled and promoted?