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It's interesting to contrast China's approach of not allowing business to operate within the plane of power in which the government does, vs. the United States, which has companies whose power is certainly on the level of many state governments.
Great move. This will increase local competition and wages, diversify ideas and design, and make shareholders more money than as a single entity. As with Standard Oil and AT&T. The U.S. should continue investigating splitting up Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
No it won't. It will reduce competition. Are you going to now compete with the official government supported entity?
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Apple Hardware, Apple Licensed OSes, Apple Online Services, Apple Financial Services (apple card & apple pay & co), Apple News Services, Apple Mapping Services. Think of everything that Apple (Meta, Google) do, think on which components would benefit from having startups replace and distrupt them and then break them up on those seams while forcing them to allow competition between their fragments (e.g. iPhone with An…
Which of them will own apple.com? Which of them will own Apple trademark? Which of them will own Apple logo?
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To me the complicating factor is “why”. I’m not sure why China as a government makes the calls it does. It’s not clear to me that those aren’t just as self serving as say a big company in the us operating freely and so on.
China can't print money and go in infinite debt mode like the US does? The government needs to recover from COVID. Perspective: As leader the in control, I see there's a company that has the largest payment network in the country. Well that can't happen. I need a slice of it. So let's "regulate" it.
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It doesn't make sense to split Apple into hardware and software since the integration and simplicity that comes from it is the very thing that makes Apple unique.
Unfortunately this is also the source of all their monopolistic behavior. Apple hardware should be incentivized to make great hardware for any operating system. Apple software should be incentivized to sell to many manufacturers and also to not obey apple hardware's demands for locks to prevent things like the replacement of batteries. Their union could be a great thing, but apple decided to use it to be a bunch of m…
People buy apple hardware for the integrated experience. e.g. I am not gonna buy a Dell running macOS or a Mac running Windows11.
It's interesting to contrast China's approach of not allowing business to operate within the plane of power in which the government does, vs. the United States, which has companies whose power is certainly on the level of many state governments.
To me the complicating factor is “why”. I’m not sure why China as a government makes the calls it does. It’s not clear to me that those aren’t just as self serving as say a big company in the us operating freely and so on.
The People’s Liberation Army, People’s Armed Police and Militia answer to the Central Military Commission which is subordinate directly to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
It isn’t like the United States or Europe or even Japan or Korea. Your basic assumptions vis a vis how we work and therefore how they must work will never work when trying to serve as a proper lens for interpreting the PRC because the PRC is itself an institution subordinate to a Party which considers all aspects of Chinese society both public and private subordinate to the Party including State, Religion and the activities families and businesses of their subjects which in their eyes doesn’t stop at the border if you are of Chinese descent.
So if a business like Alibaba or a businessman like Jack Ma is challenging anything about that framework, or the laws of the PRC and policies of the CCP, they can’t afford to let that stand because the most important thing to them is maintaining their internal cohesion and power. Everything else is secondary or tertiary.
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I'm not an expert on this, but from what I gather this all leads back to a power struggle between Jack Ma and Xi Jinping. Ma was ready to go public with AliPay and in the build up to it made a speech that criticised the government regulation as being out of date. This was viewed as a challenge to the governments power. Over the next few months the government moved to tighten regulations on companies like AliPay and d…
Also, one of Ma’s last public appearances was at an American conference, maybe TechCrunch but I’m not sure, where he said in an on stage interview something to the effect of, “I’m not afraid of the CCP”, in relation to recent revelations he was a CCP member. Then he got disappeared shortly after. He was really clueless about what kind of org he was dealing with.
It's interesting to contrast China's approach of not allowing business to operate within the plane of power in which the government does, vs. the United States, which has companies whose power is certainly on the level of many state governments.
I came across a comment that resonated with me and seems relevant in this context, so I saved it. It says: "The arc of communism is long and it leans towards oppressing the fuck out of people. It’s a tendency of all governmental systems. Communism rests most of its power in the hands of government without a moneyed elite to oppose them, so it tends to move to authoritarianism faster and with less resistance."
Great move. This will increase local competition and wages, diversify ideas and design, and make shareholders more money than as a single entity. As with Standard Oil and AT&T. The U.S. should continue investigating splitting up Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.