Walmart competes with Mom and Pop grocery stores. Google is competing with god damn Amazon. And possibly future startups that might otherwise try to enter the smart speaker space, but decide not to because they can't compete at that price point. In which case, great...that is not a case of a large corporation leveraging their size/position to harm customers.
I think you could argue Walmart was primarily competing with mom and pop stores a decade ago (though really other large supermarkets at that point), but they are most certainly competing with amazon today.
How can preventing competition be great? If innovative startups are prevented from entering the market because of predatory pricing, it does harm customers.
As far as I understand it, it's taboo because the results will be misused, and any results that do exist will not necessarily apply to the genetics 100 years from now but the consequences of their misuse would. And unless we're going to go full Gattaca, then I'm not sure what good the results would be.
Generally speaking you're spot on and I think the 'report' is unrealistic. The one wild card I could see accelerating EV in the heartland is wind power.
If you look at wind speed maps of America (http://apps2.eere.energy.gov/wind/windexchange/wind_maps.asp ) there is huge generating capacity going right through the Dakota's. With the decline in manufacturing jobs, politicians there may soon see investing in wind energy jobs as the future.
That doesn't solve the problem of making an electric truck that meets the needs of rural America, but it does put a lot of cheap energy in their backyard waiting to charge giant truck batteries.
Chinese people want the Apple brand they don't care about iOS. If iOS was the status symbol it would get pirated and installed elsewhere. Apple has a strong brand because of it's history as a premium device company internationally, that's all. Their brand was their first mover advantage in China but now Chinese companies are closing that brand gap and since WeChat rules the software side Apple is going to have a hard time being a big player until it can differentiate itself on something other than brand.
Other than the brand factor, iPhone is actually a better phone. Before the current iPhone I have, I had always been an Android user. I used entry-level Android phones, high-end Android phones such as Samsung Galaxy, iPhone is clearly a better phone. iOS feels more smooth, reliable, battery-efficient in many ways than Android phones. Honestly, I have not looked back since the switch.
Without wading into a my-anecdotes-against yours battle, I think most would agree that at this point Chinese smartphone shoppers have options from Xiaomi and Huawei among others[1] that are of equal quality to Apple hardware (and may be better designed for their market).
Xiaomi are not available for sale outside of China. (Well, not without jumping through hoops and weird resellers).
They have zero name recognition worldwide and the platform is fitted to the china market. There are some minor localisation and translation work to go global. Most important of all: They lack the brand recognition (westerner are very sensitive to branding and associate china with cheap shit).
Outside of that, they do S6/iphone7 equivalents for half the price.
They could blow away every single android manufacturers single handedly if they went global.
> Other than the brand factor, iPhone is actually a better phone
But since a couple of years, any smartphone in a mid range price is good enough.
iPhones provide better experience and hardware? Perhaps, I won't debate that, they are premium and Apple does a fantastic job integrating their software with their hardware.
But to an average user, why pay +$700 when to their use case a $300 smartphone servers them well?
iMessage is the only distinguishing benefit iPhone has. If WeChat or other apps are more popular in a market, I see Apple having a serious challenge.
The UI on the iPhone is incredibly challenging for me, especially web browsing.
I have a long list of criticisms on Android but both platforms seem incredibly flawed. The companies appear busy concoting marketing features and not with improving the functionality and experience.
I'm staying with the iPhone purely because of iMessage and Snapchat. I also don't want to waste time on the web, so the clunkiness is a benefit.
Google, charitably, continues to step on their own d|ck at every possible opportunity when it comes to text communication (chat and sms). Apple definitely got this overwhelmingly correct with iMessage. Google can't even decide what stuff belongs in what app, and they've done the Hokey Pokey more times than I can count. SMS is now integrated in Google voice. SMS is now integrated into Hangouts. SMS is now moving out of Hangouts and into Messages or maybe Allo or maybe Duo. And optionally in a ravamped Google Voice.
Gchat is now in Hangouts. Hangouts works also in a laptop web browser. Allo and Duo and Messages do not work in a browser. And Allo will spam the recipient to also download Allo when delivering the message.
Meanwhile, in Hangouts, for two years, I can't play voicemails, I get a message that it's unavailable. One every phone I've bought including a Google Nexus branded phone, and a Motorola phone when Google owned Motorola.
Anyway, I'd say great new things sure. But there's always yet another new thing and new way of doing it. It's exhausting. There is no such thing as polishing existing stuff. They move on to new things before polish really ever catches on.
I agree there's shenanigans with iMessage, which is why it's not perfect. But I personally have no evidence it's malicious rather than incompetency, and in other respects it's better than what Google is doing by leaps and bounds. (And I use Android, not iOS).
Windows Phone, I think given how far behind Microsoft was at the time it finally was released, they should have rolled it out as completely free and open source. And even at anytime up until about two years ago they could have done this. Now, I think it wouldn't matter. Too bad.
As far as I know you can deregister a number from iMessage by logging in to your appleID on the web. There's no simple way for hem know whether you've switched to android or just put your phone in a drawer unless you log in and tell them.
Chinese people want the Apple brand they don't care about iOS. If iOS was the status symbol it would get pirated and installed elsewhere.
There is still a significant difference in quality! My girlfriend's Samsung phone has a lot more battery problems. The interface for changing settings isn't as nice. Changing the battery in a Samsung is a bit of an adventure, even for someone who has serviced his own Macbook over many years.
In terms of experience, Apple still has it over Samsung.
I don't think so. Ben's point (as I took it) was that Apple has a monopoly on iOS (because only their devices have it) and that gives them a very strong hold on users, there is too much friction in switching to Android.
But in China if people don't really care about iOS that monopoly is worthless and their normal strategy for retaining users doesn't work, which means they're competing on a completely different basis in China than anywhere else.
Chinese consumers do care about iOS vs Android. It's just that the Android ecosystem has been much too horrible in China (Play being blocked, big-name companies have their own "app store", affiliated apps keep waking up each other in background to increase DAU). Those problems go away automatically if you pick iPhone.
The best-selling Android phones in China (Oppo/Vivo, Huawei, Xiaomi) have this horrible problem in control, by providing their customized Android with aggressive permission control, background apps cleanup etc. This also closes up the gap between iOS and Android without Google's presence.
How would iOS get pirated when the only way to install it is by using a certificate that only Apple holds? If it was easy enough to reverse engineer iOS and remove that install requirement, I'm sure it would have been done by now.
I worked with Cotulla in the HD2 community during the htc-linux days and we had iOS 5.x booting on the device up till springboard, there were definitely issues but not "impossible".
Seriously? There is a thriving jailbreak scene for iOS. It doesn't sound insurmountable at all. I think the only reason there's no iOS analogue to the Hackintosh is because nobody has bothered.
Consumers in China do know iOS and iPhone are better. As I mentioned in another comment, it's just very hard for an outsider to get into China market as a service provider.
> Chinese people want the Apple brand they don't care about iOS
These kind of statements are ridiculous.
(1) There is no evidence. (2) It assumes all of the Chinese think and act the same. (3) It assumes brand is the only decisioning metric when design and implementation can equally be important.
> If iOS was the status symbol it would get pirated and installed elsewhere
The look & feel of iPhones and iOS has been pirated and reimplemented on Android since day 1. You can goto MBK in Bangkok or Shenzhen in China and buy dozens of different models. Guess what ? They are nasty and buggy as hell and so don't sell.
Just like in sports, you get paid more for what you have done vs what you could do.
Having a few really good pieces of work to show off is no guarantee that you'll consistently pump out good work, or that you haven't left clients high and dry before. Since a third party has no real way of gauging that except by your track record, they're taking more of a chance on someone with less of a track record. More risk means they need more reward, which means you get paid less.
Most of us COULD run a Fortune 500 company as well as the average CEO but we won't get the chance, nor compensation, until we have the experience.
I hand out with three groups of people: geeks, hacks and lawyers. All of them often easily think they could easily do any other job. This includes the lawyers and journalists thinking that making software is easy. Based on that, I think we're as deluded as they are.
Perhaps there are a lot of people that are simply not very good at what they do, for instance because they don't care about doing a good job. If you then care about doing a good job, then there are a lot of jobs you can already do better than the people currently doing them. You will never be as good as the people with relevant training and experience that care about doing a good job, but you could be right that you could do a pretty good job.
Agreed. I know that "fudiciary duty" is a thing, but not what it involves. There are laws about accounting standards, but I can't even say what standard accountants need to rech to know those standards. I only found put a year ago that, in the UK, the (director?) of a Limited company can become personally liable for company debts if they trade while insolvent.
Import and export laws? Nope. Which parts of an employment contract are enforceable? Nope. Minimum standards for office temperature, cleanliness, health and safety? Nope. How much unpaid overtime you can make your employees do, and how that intersects with minimum wage rules. Nope.
Copyright, trademark and patent laws I think I get, but I don't know them inside-out.
All things that you list are very specific domains, you'd have dedicated people responsible for them in even a medium-size corporation. The thing you really need to know, is how to make sure these people do not lie to you and do their work honestly and responsibly. One of the options is having corresponding competence yourself, but that doesn't scale.
Delegation is a black art, that's what I mean, but without really mastering it you cannot manage anything with >10 people, especially in high tech.
But that's not what people mean when they say they could run a Fortune 500 company if given the chance. All of the things you list are things that are easily learned, the bigger question is whether in addition to that knowledge the CEOs of big companies have any particular character traits, unique skills or business insights or not.
I have a feeling that if I took all the time and energy I've put into studying and working with computers my entire life and chose to put all that time and energy into studying and working with business concepts instead, I'd be able to run a business, possibly even a Fortune 500 one.
Alas I didn't spend all that time and energy on business, so I can't run a Fortune 500 company, but alternate universe me might.
I think I explained myself quite poorly, because I agree with you.
I meant "get" it in the sense that I can tell when I do or don't need a lawyer, rather than my friends and family who moan about Google for (c)-ing a photo of the sky ("They don't own the sky!") or what trademarks and patents are even for ("How did Apple get a patent on putting the letter 'i' in front of every product name?", to paraphrase).
I'm no expert, but I'm not a n00b either [that said, I think the monkey should own the copyright on their selfie, not the camera owner, but that's opinion not law. :)]
The rest if my examples, well… I don't even know enough to know if they are hard or easy. Which should be a good sign that I don't have the skills to run a business in its own right, so I'm not sure why other people are telling me I'm wrong about not being able to.
There ARE studies showing that CEO pay does not correlate with company success. Which I think implies a lot of big ships nearly run themselves. So I wouldn't say most of us could, but those with a sufficient enough business/managerial experience could, and many of those make a fraction of what a fortune 500 CEO makes.
I imagine a whole lot of people could do a better job than Yahoo's new CEO, for example. At that level, being the CEO of a corporation with that level of money that already runs itself, you could likely get by doing pretty much nothing/just going along with your advisors'/the board's advice to keep the company at least in the black.
It's often hard for people to appreciate the scale at which the CEO has an impact. As an individual engineer, if you're replaced by someone who's not an engineer, they are going to fail big time... But the amount of damage they can go to the company is very limited. Someone else will just pick up their slack, and the financial loss to the company is likely less than a million dollars.
At the CEO level though, even if you don't fill completely, even if you're 99% as good as the previous CEO, that 1% difference on a massive company translates to a loss of tens/hundreds of millions of dollars. And that's assuming you're 99% as good. If you're only 90% as good, the damage is even greater.
Can you scrape by as CEO without bankrupting the company? Sure. But there's a reason why boards are still willing to pay millions of dollars to hire the best possible candidate. Because when you're managing assets worth billions of dollars, scrimping on a few million is simply premature optimization.
> Most of us COULD run a Fortune 500 company as well as the average CEO
I appreciate your optimism; at the same time, I think it is somewhat unwarranted.
Running a 10-person company is challenging enough to have your shrink on the speed dial. As for Fortune 500 CEOs, those are superhumans on steroids (or cocaine and alcohol), who bend reality by their very presence. You have about the same chance of approaching their attitude as becoming an Olympic athlete.
Thankfully, there are other ways to achieve happiness (or make money, if you want something more quantitative) without becoming a big company CEO. One thing I know for sure: I don't envy them.
There is a substantial intersection between wealthy people and CEOs, but they're still employees, so they're not that wealthy.
I have no doubt that a lot of big-co CEOs are operating at the limit of human capacity, but that doesn't really have any effect on my opinion of trust fund kids.
Extraordinary claims would do well to find some extraordinary evidence to support them, lest they collapse under the weight of their disproportionate grandeur.
If price is your thing, Linode for compute and Backblaze for storage; 4 CPU and 8GB RAM for $40 a month and 1/2 cent per month per gig. For full feature cloud I find Azure a better competitor to AWS as far as features/price/interface and per minute billing.
