501–510 of 566 posts
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With something like $150 billion+ in the bank, it might just be a long term viable strategy.
... Until the taxman catches up with them. Then it's game over.
Most of the cash from overseas operations is overseas which is legal.
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I think people need to remember that Apple is a tiny, tiny innovative core surrounded by a huge bog-standard "big-corp" full of the same chimps from the Career Builder commercials that all big-corps have. If you're not part of that tiny core, you just work at Office Space.
This seems to be true. And also, while internet is full of stories of "what it's like to work at Google/Facebook/etc", you will have hard time finding a similar one about Apple. My explanation for that is that the "tiny innovative core" is way too overworked to write about themselves and everyone else is just irrelevant.
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With this negative image among developers in the Valley, how is Apple able to attract top quality engineers? They probably are not. Anecdotally, I still haven't met one single engineer who would love to work for Apple though they love using Apple products. Apple is not even on the list of all top graduating kids who wants a job in top valley firms (Google, FB, Dropbox, Twitter, AirBnB, Uber, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Quor…
You only hear the negative stories because of Apple's culture of secrecy. Writing publicly about the company is a big no-no.
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The concept isn't normative and it definitely is meaningful. Another way to describe cost centers is that their benefit is very hard to measure but their cost easy to measure. People know that in the limit of non-existence, the company can't survive without it, so customer support has to exist. But as long as money is used to support them with no easily measurable benefit, it will always experience strong downward pr…
Another way to describe cost centers is that their benefit is very hard to measure but their cost easy to measure By that metric, marketing and advertising must be cost centers! But they somehow always manage to take credit for revenue. Honestly I think that "cost centers" are a combination of politics and managerial laziness. If you only place value on the "easily measurable" benefits, then the beneficial but more d…
I'm puzzled by this. Compared to customer support, marketing's benefit is _very_ easy to measure. You just correlate a given marketing action or strategy (say, a particular ad) with the lead generation / customer acquisition / "new" customer base metrics over its duration + a certain margin afterwards calculated from your product's delay-to-purchase, comparing with your prior projected growth at the rate it was going before the marketing strategy.
Of course once you throw in larger entities and multiple concurrent strategies and other confounders it takes a bit more math chops to isolate specific edges, but usually it's easier for a manager to find information about measuring marketing output than for typical "cost centers". And when all else fails, that's what the "Where did you hear about us?" box on the questionnaire is there for.
> And maybe a department only gets labeled a "cost center" in the first place if the manager running it is not influential or politically savvy enough to take credit for a piece of the revenue.
But yet, that's the kind of manager who gets put there! You want your best managers in the meaningful places that your company really relies on, and the lesser ones, well, there's an open spot down in Office Health & Safety right?
So it "earns" the label of a cost center because management put its worst person in charge of it. Okay. That's still... bad overall management, not just bad political savvy on the part of one manager.
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http://www.cnet.com/products/samsung-sch-i730-verizon-wirele... 2005, 2 years before the iphone. And even called a smartphone in the review. Touch screen keyboardless iphone clone, no. But smartphone, yes. Apple didn't invent this category, they just changed it.
And it must have sucked or else people would have bought it in iPhone-like numbers. Apple changed the category by figuring it out.
When the iPhone launched, people like me [0] couldn't really understand it. I was a top five percentile earner in the UK, but still new to that bracket having only recently left uni. I was used to mobile phones being expensive at £400 commitment, £1800 (Uk price with minimum O2 exclusive contract) was unbelievable to me.
I made the mistake of looking at the original iPhone, and seeing something that was slow (no 3G), didn't have GPS (recently moved to London, I needed my GPS-maps!) and didn't support any third party applications. It was a joke. It sold buckets loads.
The problem was before that mobile apps were a limited affair. We had things like google maps on smartphones, but not much effort went in. We had a few games, but no one was really pushing serious money in that direction.
The iPhone became a fashion hit. It was the must have for the 20-something plus who could afford it, it was a status symbol because of price. Everything about it was worse than phones on the market, it took ages to make a call, writing a text took considerably longer. It simply didn't make sense as a phone.
However it became a platform. Companies from all walks of life, some who hadn't really bothered to have a website suddenly needed an 'App' for their marketing team to be happy. This created such gravity, people thought that Android would never be able to compete.
The internals of it were not really special at all, it was quite slow, the screen resolution awfully poor. It wasn't until the 4 addressed that last major concern I bought one.
[0] - http://forums.hexus.net/iphone-ios/110525-iphone-demo.html#p...
Their hardware, sold as rock-solid, is partly flawed. My (and thousands of other users ) Macbook graphic card broke after 12 month. The OS and their software has become bloated inconsistent and buggy. Their customer service is so bad, it even beats some of the worst telecom companies in my country. Their sales people are good looking but technically incompetent. Some of Apples technologies (Applescript, Objective-C) are just awful.
I think Apple products and services are only usable, if you have a lot of money to throw around and if you don't really rely on them, but look at them as toys to play around.
Using Ubuntu and Android now, I can admit that the UI is not nearly as sexy. But stuff works or can be fixed in reasonable time.
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When someone says "any company", it's easy to interpret that as meaning "any company without exception". This is a very logical interpretation, but it is not necessarily reasonable to interpret it that way. My experience is that (1) most companies do a lot of things wrong (2) the respect which support receives varies from company to company as well as industry to industry, with business support taken more seriously t…
> When someone says "any company", it's easy to interpret that as meaning "any company without exception". This is a very logical interpretation, but it is not necessarily reasonable to interpret it that way. Well, it's not logical at all in the common sense of the word logical. It's like you're talking to a compiler... In casual conversation everybody understands that it doesn't mean "absolutely every company".
That's not true at all! There are lots of people (myself included) who tend to interpret things very literally, and would not recognize this subtlety. So not EVERY person understands that...
... oh. Never mind.
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You know what else is a cost center? Engineering. It's perceived as a massive step up from Call Center or Customer Support or QA but it's just marginally closer to revenue generation than the sales reps and can suffer many the same issues. At a previous company I managed to end up doing my software development work under a Sales title, so I could get the quota and commissions that would come with it. All of a sudden…
The very notion of "cost centres" vs "profit centres" is incoherent. If a function is necessary for the longevity of the business, it is a profit centre. If it is not, it shouldn't be part of the business. Treating business units that book revenue as "profit centres" only makes sense if the revenue they book is entirely due to goods and services supplied by magic elves. Otherwise, the work done to enable that revenue…
Wow, that hits close to home. I think I'll be using that line in the future, thanks!
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You know what else is a cost center? Engineering. It's perceived as a massive step up from Call Center or Customer Support or QA but it's just marginally closer to revenue generation than the sales reps and can suffer many the same issues. At a previous company I managed to end up doing my software development work under a Sales title, so I could get the quota and commissions that would come with it. All of a sudden…
The very notion of "cost centres" vs "profit centres" is incoherent. If a function is necessary for the longevity of the business, it is a profit centre. If it is not, it shouldn't be part of the business. Treating business units that book revenue as "profit centres" only makes sense if the revenue they book is entirely due to goods and services supplied by magic elves. Otherwise, the work done to enable that revenue…
Companies full of ego maniacs eat themselves alive from the inside out. It takes a while for small problems to become big problems, but I think the Apple of 2025 is going to look more like today's Hp or Yahoo than the Apple of 2015.
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You know what else is a cost center? Engineering. It's perceived as a massive step up from Call Center or Customer Support or QA but it's just marginally closer to revenue generation than the sales reps and can suffer many the same issues. At a previous company I managed to end up doing my software development work under a Sales title, so I could get the quota and commissions that would come with it. All of a sudden…
> a low-base / high-commission model is proven to attract and incentivize talented reps and drive out the low performers I'm interested in hearing how this is proven. I've seen incentivized sales reps close deals that damaged the company, just like I've seen "successful" marketing campaigns that eventually killed their products. If you use bookings as your metric for bonuses and then turn around and use bookings to m…
Just to give you an idea of why this model is attractive ... and also why there is such huge churn in Sales. If you don't succeed pretty quickly, you're going to be broke.