Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should your employees take over any company you found?
Should one person make life changing decisions for millions? Why do I even need to ask this?
Very few companies have millions of employees. Plenty of nations do.
Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations
21–30 of 179 posts
Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations
#22This made me laugh ... > “Many employees don’t like Apple Park [the company’s new headquarters] because it has very few private offices. ... nice one Jony ... design a brave and “beautiful” open plan workspace for a paranoiacally secretive organisation. Says it all really.
> ... nice one Jony ... design a brave and “beautiful” open plan workspace for a paranoiacally secretive organisation. I feel like it's worth pointing out that Steve Jobs was still running Apple when this building was designed. I don't work for Norman Foster so I have no way to know how much changed internally after he died, but I doubt the balance shifted too wildly given the logistical constraints of massive constr…
> I'd want to foster a corporate culture of extreme openness and collaboration inside the walls
Open space offices are entirely othogonal to this idea.
Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations
#23Doesn't Apple need the secrecy to survive? Imagine Nokia getting hold of the specs of the original iPhone early before its release, how would the world be today?
Not really - industrial espionage is really rare. Google is much more open and their technology doesn't get stolen. Sure, product designs leak before their release, but that doesn't really matter much.
That you know of. Just because it does not make the news does not mean it does not happen.
Usually it is in neither parties interest to reveal such an event. I know of at least one such instance and the extreme lengths a Chinese competitor went to steal (not google).
Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations
#24Doesn't Apple need the secrecy to survive? Imagine Nokia getting hold of the specs of the original iPhone early before its release, how would the world be today?
Nokia's woes were on software side, not hardware. Building a competitive software stack proved too slow an undertaking for a hardware company. It was Android in the end that ate Nokia's pie, not Apple.
Also they only took Apple seriously way too late.
Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations
#25It is essentially the same at all corporations, always has been.
Lenin was a great admirer of Ford Motor Company. His Soviet committees were copied directly from Ford.
You could think of the SSRs as divisions, and satellite countries as wholly-owned subsidiaries.
Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should your employees take over any company you found?
Should one person make life changing decisions for millions? Why do I even need to ask this?
The answer to that question is obviously yes, but I don’t think that’s why you thought the question didn’t need to be asked.
For starters there are both elected and non-elected offices in government where one person will be given the power to make life changing decisions for millions. This is a perfectly ordinary feature of organised society.
Regarding companies, if you don’t want people who own companies (or their agents) to be able to decide how the companies are run, then you need to prohibit either private property, or employment all together.
An employment agreement is simply one party offering labour, and another offering payment for it, and a company is simply people pooling their resources together to achieve more than they could alone (companies server other purposes to, but this is the relevant purpose for this discussion).
An employer is always going to be able to make decisions that are life changing for their employees, by deciding they no longer require their labor for instance, by ceasing operations, or relocating, or withdrawing a product/service from the market.
If you don’t want employers to have the ability to make decisions that impact the lives of their employees, then you either need to abolish private property (the ability to offer payment for labor now becomes impossible), or outlaw employment agreements. Whether an employer has one employee or one million is really besides the point.
Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations
#27Another way to think about this topic is that China's CEO is Xi Jingpin. There are a few distinctions between calling China a company and calling Apple a nation: - A nation uphelds the law whereas a company uses proxies (lobbying) to make laws - A nation has diplomatic rights, a company has to abide by export controls - A nation has a treasury, has control over interest rates and can prosecute violators, it ensures a…
Companies make internal rules that employees have to follow or be punished/fired. They have to comply with the laws where laws have to comply with the constitution and basic human rights.
Diplomatic rights only go so far after you declare war. Most companies are in a constant state of economic war with their competitors.
The nations of Europe gave away the control over their currency.
Most nations can hardly win a war, especially a war against one of the superpowers.
A company can also reassign people to the "retirement building".
You could argue that most nations aren't truly nations. Which I would agree to.
Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations
#28"Apple’s market valuation is roughly equal to the national net worth of Denmark (...). In all but name, this is a superpower"
Denmark is a really nice country. Also, it is not a superpower.
Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is perfectly normal, perfectly acceptable, and the only way to ever make the concept of a company work. Because companies play a completely different role in society to government. For starters, because of freedom of association. You are free to not work for any company you like. If you feel like an employer is oppressing you, you can simply leave (unless they’re violating labor protection laws, then you can recov…
> For starters, because of freedom of association. You are free to not work for any company you like. If you feel like an employer is oppressing you, you can simply leave Nice in theory, but what about companies that are so large that they effectively control the labor market? What about companies with non-compete agreements? What about collusive non-poaching agreements between companies that lower the market value o…
> but what about companies that are so large that they effectively control the labor market
There is no such company in the world, and if there was, it would almost certainly be an illegal monopoly.
All but one of the rest of your theories are illegal everywhere, and the last one is illegal in many places (or at lease unenforceable).
If you have a problem with companies breaking the law, then you have a problem with law enforcement. Not corporate governance in general.
Re: Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations
#30Doesn't Apple need the secrecy to survive? Imagine Nokia getting hold of the specs of the original iPhone early before its release, how would the world be today?
It wouldn't have made any difference.
Nokia R&D had a touchscreen-only phone prototype in early noughties. It got killed, and while I have not seen the actual memo, I've heard people quoting from it: "Nokia will never make a touchscreen-only phone."
Apple launched iPhone a few months later.