You could say that about the majority of people on MacRumors, just wanna hate, never satisfied.
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New Survey Says Amazon and Google Have a More 'Positive Impact on Society' Than Apple
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For the same reason, I guess we shouldn't watch TV or the OTA channels because their sole purpose is to sell ads? We should always pay premium price for content. Will you agree?
Both those companies have been ad-driven companies. I'm not sure if you are making a specific distinction between ad companies (that produce ads like you see on TV and print) and ad-driven companies, in which case Facebook and Google are the latter.
Whatever Zuck says, the numbers are the numbers (which have been and likely will continue to change.. however it doesn't alter the reality of the current trend, by revenues)
Those are entirely different industries. If I build a computer, write software and sell it, that's a consumer technology company. If I produce programming, or write software in order to give it away so that I can extract your personal data and sell it back to advertisers, that's something else entirely.
Consumers still do pay for premium content though, and many of us prefer to pay extra for less (or no) advertising at all. Perhaps not so surprisingly, I refuse to pay cable television providers for the aforementioned 'ad'-fueled programming; I find the service to be entirely too expensive for the choices on offer.
Ad-driven company vs ad company are different. People who are into building software, know how much of an impact google/amazon/facebook has on us. We can do things that we couldn't have think of doing because of these companies. Every coin has two sides. So we have to be cautious about it. We need to give credit where it is due and criticize when it's appropriate. What I don't like is the blatant criticism of companies because they are competing against Apple.
And it was in my hands too, but not mainstream. Many people skipped computers entirely and went mobile.
In 2007 I had a blackberry and the other alternative was palm. People who used the internet didn’t use it on a ‘smart’ phone the because it sucked/unusable. So really only those who had a computer were using it, which wasn’t a lot of people compared to today. Apple mainstreamed the access to the internet.
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Amazon is not anti-union? I don't remember Tesla employees crying at their desks or peeing in bottles to avoid an uncomfortable lecture or worse getting fired for using the restroom while at work.
I didn't say Amazon wasn't, but I also hadn't heard that Bezos was ranting on Twitter that someone who was trying to start a union was a plant by a union.
I don’t agree. With traditional broadcast, it is very easy to “opt out.” Broadcast agencies have no idea if you specifically are listening to or watching an ad or even their networks. Sure, they have an idea overall, but YOUR habits specifically are not known. Even then, the issue with technology companies like Facebook, Google, or possibly even Amazon, is that they can harvest data about you, even if you aren’t a “customer” of theirs. You may be mostly anonymous or protected by not using their services, but you a very likely to become part of the data if you know people that DO use the service. They no doubt even snoop your browser cookies.
Your points are arguable short sighted. If you look at all the freedom and communication that Facebook offers, it might eclipse all of these except you also have to look at the data mining and advertising issues too. When TV was introduced, it was number 1 on a list like this but not so today because of all the manipulation and corruption that we know advertising brings us. Ad based social networks and internet search are no different. This price has yet to be paid but we still know it's coming.
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At least ranting on Twitter is semi-transparent. You don't know if or how Bezos has threatened his employees but based on testimonials and journalists' reports, it's much worse than any Twitter rant against unions.
No one can blame Google for being the best at what they do. They initially started like a bunch of other search engine companies but they had the best algorithms. They kept improving all the time and no other product is as good at getting relevant, often obscure, results that people need quickly. This should’ve been an area the Microsoft could’ve dominated in. They had the resources but Bing was too late to the party no matter how heavily they promoted it.
Bezos is another brilliant guy who knew exactly when to start diversifying and turning the business into more than an online bookstore. In a way it was inevitable. If it could be done with books, it could be done with nearly any type of good. Today there are just a few primarily B&M companies left and I wouldn’t count on them surviving another decade. They just can’t compete with high rent prices and all of the overhead.
Bezos is another brilliant guy who knew exactly when to start diversifying and turning the business into more than an online bookstore. In a way it was inevitable. If it could be done with books, it could be done with nearly any type of good. Today there are just a few primarily B&M companies left and I wouldn’t count on them surviving another decade. They just can’t compete with high rent prices and all of the overhead.
You could say that about the majority of people on MacRumors, just wanna hate, never satisfied.
I agree. Especially for those who are very critical on Apple in general, I would say there is more dissatisfaction because of all the changes they have made over the few years, but it doesn’t shy away the company‘s growth as a whole and their success.
When the heck did growth and success have an absolute positive impact on society. The concept is subjective and must be accounted for in terms that are personal or opinion based. To disregard the opinions of even the posters on Macrumors just reinforces the fact there is a lack of understanding of what the message in the article is.
Yes, Google. Without Google the iPhone would have been worthless, what is a powerful device for if you can't access most of the internet? even this site, we wouldn't be having this conversation here if it weren't for Google Search and Google Ads.
Like it or not, the internet of today is 90% thanks to Google. And the internet changed the world.
Google had been accessed well over 10 years before the iPhone by millions of people, Google wouldn't depend on it. If anything, it's the iPhone that should be grateful with Google and Amazon (and other third parties) for making the iPhone the device it is today.
You forget Amazon also has high warehouse and shipping costs. Often they are not the cheapest. The "Sales" part of Amazon barely makes any money - it's AWS that carries most or all of Amazon's profits (when there are profits - they only recently made a profit).
But that's OK as once they are the only game in town expect prices to continually go up.
That's a very wrong assumptions. Competition doesn't always bring lower prices. Only disruption does.
There are 4 cell phone carriers. Have you seen any price reduction?
There are so many cable providers including satellite. Have you seen any price reduction?
I guess if those are the choices, you have to pick one, but none seem to have a positive impact on society. Google and Facebook are selling their customers to the highest bidder, Amazon is selling stuff for dirt cheap prices to stay alive and take over while its actual profits come from their cloud services and Wall Streets fever dreams. Telsa makes cars for really rich people subsidized by poor people. I would have to go with the ride share services, they are truly disrupting an industry and changing our relationships to cars.
If one company can "make or break" that much of society, then we may have a problem. It's becoming increasingly more difficult to do things without Facebook, Google, and Amazon. The issue for these companies is that they all can manipulate results for their own reasons, and at least 2 of them have been caught doing exactly that. No doubt the internet has changed the world, but we have to realize that the biggest players involved are looking at shareholder return as their primary motivator. If you look at the sorry state of journalism today, it follows a formula of shoddy research, a clickbait headline, and a comment section full of angry people. The ad revenue flows while humanity becomes more divided than ever.
I'm a bit busy to go run down his stance (and thus Amazon's) on unions however based on the pee jar comment that keeps popping up, I think it's fair to say he's in the anti- camp. That being said, take Amazon off that list too.