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Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

wsj.com

31–40 of 124 posts

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#31

I'm not sure comparing a second headquarters and a tech support site is apt. I'm not sure how loud the search is matters. WSJ is a joke. Look, I can twist words too: "While Amazon is clearer and open about employee counts and candidate locations for HQ2, Apple remains secret and opaque about any details even for small site". Abatements abound regardless, lets not treat the differences in culture between Amazon and Ap…

Good point.

Secrecy and tax deals are two different issues.

One's opinion on one should not be conflated with the other.

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#32
I think the reason Amazon had to announce their search publicly is because their HQ2 project is so much bigger than Apple's or any other company's.

60,000 jobs is not something you take up lightly, especially as it relates to transit and housing. It's the equivalent of a small city, and you're going to need to be prepared for it.

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#33
post #2

A commenter on the article made a snarky reply about Apple choosing China as that's where a lot of the manufacturing is - I wonder why Apple/Amazon don't look internationally for HQ2? Are their international offices 'big enough' for what they need?

All of them have large Canadian campuses, presumably because the US visa process is such a dumpster fire and the need for specialized advanced academic backgrounds.

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#34
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow: "We are a local media company based in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. We have detected that you are in one of the member countries of the European Union, which is now subject to the General Data Protection Regulation. ... Until we are able to ensure our full compliance with the rigorous GDPR requirements, we are blocking access from EU countries to our websites , which include wral.com, wralsportsfan.com, highsch…

Reap what you sow, Europer. Seriously though, is GDPR compliance that difficult? What does a news site have to do to comply?

That's probably the issue. The news site itself doesn't have to do much.

But the ad code and trackers and beacons and all the other stuff that they have installed on each and every page - the news site has no idea what it's doing and how to even begin ensuring compliance.

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#35
post #2

A commenter on the article made a snarky reply about Apple choosing China as that's where a lot of the manufacturing is - I wonder why Apple/Amazon don't look internationally for HQ2? Are their international offices 'big enough' for what they need?

You can't just open an office in China; you need to be a Chinese company for that, founded by a Chinese native.

Second, any Chinese company above 1000 employees needs to have a communist party shadow management - that is, for every manager above a certain level, a party representative is active at the exact same rank with the same (probably slightly higher) management power.

That's for China though, for other countries the reasoning is probably legislative and tax related.

Likewise, an European company can't just operate in the US without being incorporated in the US.

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#36
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd have to be insane to keep any of your sensitive IP in China, honestly. But mostly I assume they stick to the U.S. because that's where the talent is (and that's the government they need to have the closest relationship with, too)

Isn't all Apple's hardware IP "in" China?

Pretty much. Hardware is in China, patents and money are in Ireland, software development and hardware / visual design is in the US.

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#37
post #11

Can someone copy and paste the whole article into a comment?

If you're on a desktop/laptop computer and have a FB account, use the "fullwsj" hack: Edit the URL to say "fullwsj.com" instead of "wsj.com", and click on the link from Facebook. If on a mobile device, you can do it, but have to copy the URL and then paste into a private browsing window (at least on Safari/iOS.)

Can confirm on Chrome.

There is something interesting though. I tested it after logging out of Facebook (wanted to see what would happen). Basically I wanted to see if you needed to be logged into Facebook or not to use this redirect (would it work from the logged-out Facebook page?), but got something surprising.

I performed these steps (Chrome on Desktop, from Windows):

1. I was logged into Facebook in an incognito window. I decided to log out of it. I then removed my fast login button by clicking the X.

(Note: I didn't close that incognito window. This does mean any cookies could have been retained, I wasn't being so thorough)

2. After logging out I returned to the main Facebook.com page (to sign in) in the same window.

3. On the blank Facebook login screen , I then manually pasted https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/apple-avoids-amazons-beauty... into the URL bar in Chrome.

4. After I pressed Enter Facebook actually put up a page "Confirm leaving Facebook" with the URL. This was under the Facebook.com URL. And then I clicked the URL on that page. I got the full article.

This is what that window looked like (I reloaded it by clicking the back button in that window, while writing this comment):

https://imgur.com/a/X8bIGyX

It doesn't do this when I put in just any other URL into the URL field.

So how did this happen technically? How did Facebook.com get the new URL I put in, and halt my navigating away manually, and instead ask if I really want to go there (but remove the "full" from where 'there' is)? I don't think Chrome gives Facebook access to URL's put into the URL bar by the user...so...?

There's no chance I'm misreporting what happened because there's nowhere else I could have pasted the URL other than the URL bar, since I was logged out of Facebook at the time. I'm puzzled how this happens on a technical level.

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#38
post #28
post #8

It's pretty clear it hasn't done Amazon's reputation any favours. And there's no reason to think government officials won't go above and beyond in offering incentives behind closed doors.

Why do you think that? I think Amazon will get what they want - mainly a city to capitulate to their demands. I’ve talked to people in Pittsburgh and Atlanta and the majority wanted Amazon. I don’t think most people realize outside of tech circles that Amazon will mostly bring people in rather than hiring locally and how much they have strained the infrastructure in Seattle.

> I don’t think most people realize outside of tech circles that Amazon will mostly bring people in rather than hiring locally

Why do you say that? Amazon seems to recruit pretty heavily around me, which is far, far from Seattle and SV.

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#39

I think the reason Amazon had to announce their search publicly is because their HQ2 project is so much bigger than Apple's or any other company's. 60,000 jobs is not something you take up lightly, especially as it relates to transit and housing. It's the equivalent of a small city, and you're going to need to be prepared for it.

Plus it's a way for cities to start a bidding war, offering the lowest tax rates and property prices. Effectively Amazon will get their new HQ for free, if not have the cities actively pay for it. Because jobs. Free market, competition, etc, yay.

Re: Apple Avoids Amazon’s Beauty Contest, Searches Secretly for New Campus

#40
post #13
post #2

A commenter on the article made a snarky reply about Apple choosing China as that's where a lot of the manufacturing is - I wonder why Apple/Amazon don't look internationally for HQ2? Are their international offices 'big enough' for what they need?

You'd have to be insane to keep any of your sensitive IP in China, honestly. But mostly I assume they stick to the U.S. because that's where the talent is (and that's the government they need to have the closest relationship with, too)

In order to do business in China you need to partner with a Chinese company, that Chinese company has another partner, it's the Chinese Government. Everything you share with your partner is automatically shared with the Government and the Government shares all of that data with all of their other companies.

So if you want to manufacture a CPU, your partner needs to know all the IP, if you want to make LCD panel, your partner needs to know all your IP, etc.

This is the reason it seems China is supercharged, they are forcing companies to share IP in order to get access to their market, and that IP is shared with every other relevant company in China.

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