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Someday You'll Hate Apple (And Google Too)
jfruhlinger writes "Think today's world, where Apple is the innovative underdog, Google is the company that does no evil, and Microsoft sits atop its throne as ruler of an evil empire. Will this state of affairs last forever? You must not remember the days when everybody loved that scrappy upstart Bill Gates. Don Reisinger muses on the fickleness of consumer loves and hates. 'It's that same [level of] success and its own questionable privacy practices that will lead to Google's PR downfall and propel it into a position of disdain going forward. Trust me, the future of Apple and Google may look bright from an economic standpoint, but these companies will be hated one day too. Sad, but true.'"
Even without the internet, people have been hating Apple for decades. Usenet and forums just made it easier for them to spew their opinions about.
Blind devotion to *anything* is questionable.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
They're not religions, political parties, families, etc. They're businesses.
They don't need an adoring cult around them. They need to provide what the market demands. If people want to impute a personality or culture to a company, that's fine as far as that goes. But it's still pretty much bullshit.
"Trust me, the future of Apple and Google may look bright from an economic standpoint, but these companies will be hated one day too. Sad, but true."
Why is this sad? Surely being suspicious of powerful entities is one of the better human qualities.
That's not Picasso, that's Kandinsky!
Their "don't be evil" policy is admirable, but "evil" is subjective. Google really don't seem to be quite in step with most geeks I know when it comes to data protection and privacy.
One key difference is that Apple and Google's products have always been best-of-breed, while Microsoft has always been the lowest-common-denominator. When you say "quality", Microsoft isn't the company that jumps to mind. (Perhaps "cheap", but now Linux is eating them from below on that, so I'm not exactly sure what Microsoft's "core" is anymore.)
Thus the entire premise of the article is a bit of a straw-man: Apple's corporate goals don't appear to include even TRYING to gain a majority of the market share. Their phone only competes in the "smart" market which is 1% of the total market; their computers have no low-end offerings whatsoever; the iPods, despite having some of the best margins in the industry, are consistently undercut on price-per-feature.
E pluribus unum
You must not remember the days when everybody loved that scrappy upstate Bill Gates.
That is because there were no such days. From the very beginning, having stolen CP/M and computer time at a university to get their business running, Microsoft has always been regarded as a band of criminals largely devoid of real know-how. The fact that Google and Apple are not targets of widespread hatred in the tech community is evidence that there is more to the anti-Microsoft sentiment than simply rooting for the underdog.
Microsoft hasn't mattered in 10 years. Google is on top of the tech game now and everyone knows it. Apple is expensive and pretentious, but remains, for the most part, respected. The best Microsoft can hope for with regard to public sentiment is to transition from outright, boiling hatred to pity. If anti-Microsoft sentiment were the fickle leftist hatred of success that it is cast to be, then why would we also hate SCO, which is anything but successful?
The hatred of Microsoft is well earned, and its reasons go back to the very beginning of the company. If the SCO experience is any indication, it will long outlast the company's success.
and in Apple's case, Darwin that you conceded, Filemaker? iTunes (not the store) ?
others are pointing out more.
Are you RDF positive?
The big reason that big success companies become hated is that they try to change the way they gained their success and horde everything for themselves. If Google, or others try to do this they too will get the boot from esteem. Most people do not mind a company trying to profit. I don't.
Examples include Walmart. That outfit started out as a country store which got smart in finance but remembered to serve its customers well and and always made sure to involve the local industry in the marketing plan. Then the kids and finance guys took over from Sam Walton and to say the least, instantly the buy local and support your community stuff went the way of the dinosaurs. Bill Gates at the famous evil empire used to brag about making many other people into millionaires. He made a fortune in the USA and hiring Americans to do it. Then he got rich and decided that he should keep all the money to himself. Being as rich as 4 or 5 US States wasn't enough for him. He just had to move on to China, India and the like, forgetting the guys who made him rich. Then he decided to rent his software for developers in the USA for about $2000 a year. At the same time he practically gave it away in India and China. Well it is no wonder the programmers who were living well with him suddenly became the enemies of the empire.
I know a company McKee Baking in Collegedale Tn. This company has made its original owners and heirs quite wealthy. Nobody is anything but proud of them for their pretty successful baking empire. The reason is that they pay well, and have not tried to dump the people who made their fortune possible. If they ever do I assure you their goodwill will go with it. This is pretty simple stuff people. All you have to do if you get big is not to stomp on people and just go on earning your living. It makes friends and deters enemies.
In the case of Microsoft Corporation, they undertook about 10 years ago to begin to completely destroy the careers of American Programmers. They are hated for it now. Their product lines are not growing and are shuddering with competition because they have just about destroyed any rational reason to partner with them. Google on the other hand is for the time being a friendly helpful and cooperative giant. As long as it stays so it will be so. Once burned the good will of such a company is probably not recoverable. Microsoft will be big for some time but it is in decline and it is it's own fault. If I as a programmer could come and pitch a good new idea and get it moved on to production with their cooperation and partnership, they could be winning but they are refusing to do that. Everybody who tries this game with them loses.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
Crappy, closed-technology machines. The cult of the single-button mouse. Reseller programs from hell. Lovely laser printers that became ultimately useless. Two wire AppleTalk networks with all of the speed of ISDN on a good day. Cute little useless Newtons. Servers that could never rise above simple workgroup needs. Special connections and exceptions needed to network with anything else but perhaps NFS or wicked Novell patches. Wonderful and proprietary (given few others used them) PPC CPUs. I'm sure others can count the way. Others can see the bloom on the rose, and I still have marks from the thorns. Oddly, I still use a PowerBook G4, alongside a heavy-duty (and less expensive) HP core-duo notebook. Only for games, of course....
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
How about if you guys just give up on the groupthink instead?
The socially-reinforced need to pick out people or organizations to hate seems like something you might want to grow out of at some point.
If Apple or Google actually send assassins to kill your wife and children, go ahead and hate them. If some opinionated Internet comment-posters and the folks you chit-chat with at the office decide to hate Apple and Google, why not just encourage them to worry about reality, live their own lives, and stop the schoolgirl clique nonsense?
Don't you have anything better to do? Can't you find something before the "hate-Google" and "hate-Apple" memes get started? You have time. Now is your chance.
[President Bush's] religion encourages him to love his neighbor and to treat him as he would want to be treated. Yet a fence between his country and Mexico says otherwise. Um, I'm no Bush supporter (and it's sad that I have to run a disclaimer for even being fair to the man), but in the interest of fairness, are you saying you want to be able to just walk in no questions asked and stay as long as you want in any nation?
Sorry but no, I expect and want to be permitted to enter through legally established means, so that I may be an upstanding guest of the place I am visiting. My difficulty in affording Apple products make me think they are discriminating against the poor. What? Discriminating against the poor? Has discrimination become this catch-all now? Everyone hates discrimination, therefore, anything I don't like, down to the price someone asks for their wares is discrimination? You think someone at Apple is going "You know, we could produce these things for virtually free and give them away, but forget all that profit and paying our employees shit, what we really have to avoid is all those poor schmoes sullying our good name by using our product with a low disposable income!"
Discrimination is when you use an irrelevant attribute to make decisions. The ability to afford the product at a profitable price(*) is hardly irrelevant, and distracts from real discrimination -- and Apple is one the top 10 companies to work for if you're a minority. I'm not a fanboi, I'm just homosexual and love my wife just the same, and wish her capacity for pregnancy did not prevent her from receiving health care (I don't work for Apple, sadly).
~Rebecca
(*) Someone will invariably make a comment of gasoline or food or some such. Please understand that we're talking about Apple computer, which to my knowledge does not produce or sell anything in the "necessary for sustainable life" category. If iPods become as important as the automobile, groceries, or healthcare, we'll reconsider.
Huh? Apple has used Intel's CPUs for a long time? Where did you get that from?
The original Apple ][s were based on MOS Technology's 6502 processor, although MOS later licensed the technology to other manufacturers, Intel was never one of them, since they were doing quite well with their 8080 and then later the 80286 and successors in the x86 line. The Apple
The original Macintosh was based on the 68000 chip from Motorola, and Macs continued to be based on that chips successors, the 68020, 68030, and 68040 for several years. Then they switched to the PowerPC family which were designed by IBM and Motorola together. I believe that most of the chips were branded IBM inside the case, but I believe the chips, at least at first, were being supplied by Motorola.
The switch to Intel didn't happen until 2006, although NextSTEP, the OS that OS X was based on, ran on multiple architectures including Intel, and Apple kept making sure that OS X could be used on Intel chips in secret to give them more bargaining power.
I highly doubt we would have seen the bunny suit ads if Apple had been using Intel chips for anything mission-critical.
I dislike Windows and most other Microsoft software, but I actually agree with most of this letter. Taking other people's programs when you don't have permission isn't right, and if someone wants to make their code closed source, that's their choice too.
The two things Bill was wrong about were a) that no one would distribute software for free and b) that he would be able to deluge the hobby market with good software.
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