Slashdot Mirror
Apple Invests $1 Billion In Uber's Chinese Rival Didi (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple Inc. invested $1 billion in Chinese ride-sharing service Didi, making one of its biggest bets on software and services and dealing a blow to Uber Technologies Inc.'s ambitions in the country. The iPhone maker will help Uber's largest rival build up a ride-sharing platform that handles more than 11 million rides a day and serves about 300 million users across China, Didi said in a statement on Friday. Executive Officer Tim Cook has highlighted higher-margin services as a growth area and suggested he would use some of its $200 billion-plus cash hoard for investments. The investment in one of China's largest online companies will allow Apple to forge alliances in its single largest market outside of the United States. Didi, incorporated as Xiaoju Kuaizhi Inc., is in the process of raising more than $2 billion at a valuation of about $25 billion, people familiar with the matter have said. It operates in 400 Chinese cities and works with more than 14 million Chinese car owners. The company is Uber's most potent rival and has formed an international coalition with Lyft Inc. in the U.S., India's Ola and Southeast Asia's Grab to fight the globally expanding San Francisco firm. Apple is hoping to reinvigorate lackluster iPhone sales in China with its $1 billion investment in Didi. The last big investment the company made was when it acquired Beats for $3 billion in 2014.
I'm not posting this to troll. I'm a long time reader from the late 1990s. The site has changed tremendously and not for the better. The stories are far different than they were in the early days of Slashdot.
There was always a Your Rights Online section, which focused on intellectual property, surveillance, and other issues of the law and technology. Now, it seems like every second or third story is about the FBI or someone else fighting about encryption, some egregious intellectual property rights abuse, or police engaging in as surveillance.
There's also the Science section, which always existed. It always included also reticles about biotech, astronomy, physics, and cosmology. That's also taken over this site.
And then there are the tech business stories like this one about the business activities of Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Tesla, and similar companies. Those have always been here, but they've greatly expanded in volume.
What's lost is all the stories about creative open source projects and nerds doing cool things. Slashdot has become a mix of the Wall Street Journal, reason.com (a libertarian magazine and website), and a science journal. None of those are bad things, but they're all things that are aggregated elsewhere. The core of the community here was software development and IT work, which was reflected in the stories posted. There aren't nearly as many of those stories now. The content really has changed.
The articles that directly appealed to the core audience of Slashdot are largely gone. In the past, I could always come to Slashdot and find stories on the front page about cool open source projects in development and interesting stuff nerds were doing, whether useful or otherwise. I appreciate the creative spark from reading this website and the lively discussions that followed.
Contrary to what some people say, I don't think sites like Reddit have killed Slashdot. It's Slashdot that's killing Slashdot, by cutting back stories of interest to its core audience. That's why the good commenters have left and why the quality of the discussions are in the toilet. Slashdot was a site that catered to the stereotypical nerds portrayed on The Big Bang Theory. There are a lot of nerds like that, and Slashdot uniquely aggregated content for that particular audience. When the stories no longer interested that audience, they left. It brought in a new audience of trolls and low brow commenters. A few people from the old crew are still around but not many. It's a shame, but Slashdot pretty much sucks now.
Mod me down if you must; my post is offtopic. But it's sincere.
to the Chinese to buy his products. Sadly, he is wrong and has wasted his company's money.
Chances are the investment will all be gone in a year.
Are US 'patents' on business model or methodologies accepted anywhere else in world? There doesn't seem to be any rational other than rent seeking for allowing it. Impressive the way the population of the US have been convinced that imaginary property rights can extend so far.