Posts made in January, 2012

  When Larry Page asked Steve Jobs for advice, did Jobs tell him to drop that ridiculous “Don’t be evil” thing? My take on Google’s embrace of the dark side is here on the Daily...

“Cognitive dissonance” is the way to describe what I’m feeling this morning after reading this amazing, blistering investigative piece in the New York Times about Apple and its Chinese manufacturing partners. This time former employees at Apple and Foxconn are speaking out, and the picture is worse than previously believed. Even the notion that “every company does business this way in China” (which many people, myself included, have espoused) turns out not to be true. Apple, according to the article, is worse than the others. It pushes suppliers so hard that the only way they can make a profit is to cut corners and hurt workers. If the article is to believed, Apple does this knowingly. While Apple talks a lot about inspecting factories and dormitories, and insisting on a code of conduct, in reality these inspections don’t accomplish very much. Meanwhile, factories blow up. Read the article and see if you can ever forget the story about the guy who got his face blown off and died when a completely preventable aluminum dust explosion ripped through his workspace. It’s all incredibly depressing and disappointing. And confusing, too, because this side of Apple contradicts so sharply with the Apple that all of us experience. It seems there are two...

I’m writing up the latest quarterly numbers — sales of $46 billion! — and realizing (again) that in 10 or 20 years, when we look back on this decade, Apple, perhaps more than anything else, will be what we think of when we think of this era. Here is a $100-billion-plus company that just grew at a 73-percent rate. That’s just not supposed to happen. Sales in this recent quarter were greater than in all of fiscal 2009. And there is nothing in sight to stop this freight train. Superlatives fall short. This is beyond dominating an industry. This is about defining an age. Apple, we are not...