Bacillus3

Of course Spotify still makes a loss (they chose to do so to gain market share, you have to be pretty ignorant not to see that)
The problem here is cross-subsidizing.
If a trillion dollar company can freely hash their mony around in different markets, no other one can compete in such market unless he has the same momentum in others. Which effectively has the same effect as a true monopoly (which it by definition, isn't)
Apple (and Google, Amazon) pay for offices, server costs, stellar salaries & promotions, and can afford to make a near-permanent, severe loss without anyone even noticing by their lack of separate reporting/financial transparency.
The level playing field that Spotify is asking for is a fair deal - market regulators have to stand up more proactively.

Tim, you're on the wrong themes. Apple CEO issues are: software stability, shipping products at launch times, bringing 10 thousands of patent into useful innovation and revive your sleeping computer industry or sell it. Leave the rest to politicians, or rather become one yourself

StrangeDays said:

nhughes said:

StrangeDays said:

Hyperbolic piece, our week after Thanksgiving was joyous and without issue on any of our devices? What are we doing wrong??

Guessed the byline by the headline. 

"Major problems did not affect me, therefore they are not major problems."

I said Apple, the company, had a week that was not joyous. By any measure it was a public relations disaster. I am genuinely glad to hear your week was joyous, though.

By the same exact token -- just because some people experienced problems doesn't mean many or most. I've been with family all thru and after Thanksgiving, all Apple devices, and none of us were in a living nightmare because none of us experienced any problems. Sure bugs exist, but the way the techie echo chamber makes it out you'd think everyone's devices were failing everywhere. They aren't. 

So we should be thankful that 10 years of high-tech at 300.000 computations per second have brought you to the wisdom that unaffected users remained unaffected

The author may have done his best to hide his intrinsic "Apple is better anyway" mentality - to no avail. All his definite conclusions on a product that - until now - only didn't meet its launch date, is so lauchable that I stopped reading this article. Instead of being obsessed with Amazon's phone failure he should look at what Amazon does well and rewrite the article. Or get reborn.

SpamSandwich said:

Who is behind these protests? They might be some misguided grassroots Marxist organization or they might be George Soros funded.

It is a general feeling in society that a few elitist corporations can do anything they want The craze against moloch industries (Facebook, Google, Apple...) grabbing everything they can and having more power than complete nations is growing. A feeling of inequality that also motivated Robin Hood and Karl Marx.