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Apple just had a really poor Q3 earnings report, with hardware sales falling off as people figure out that they just don't need to get a new phone every year or so; writing in Bloomberg, Leonid Bershidsky tries to soothe investors by pointing out that Apple is still seeing growth in "services" and that there's plenty more growth to be realized there.
Bershidsky is refreshingly honest in his description of these services: he refers to repairs, sales through the App and Itunes stores, and cloud services as "collecting rent" on Apple customers and its suppliers.
As Bershidsky points out, long-term Apple users are rather locked into its ecosystem by the tedious and potentially risky process of extracting their photos, music, etc to a rival platform. That means that the suppliers of things like music, ebooks, and videos are also locked into Apple's stores, unlikely to win a battle to establish rival stores that interoperate with Apple's Itunes and other apps, but which take a smaller commission on the sale of their products. Apple has inserted itself into the transactions for copyrighted works for the foreseeable future, passively creaming off a substantial portion of the profits from the sales not because their store is the best, but because they have used DRM and other proprietary tactics to lock out competitors.
A Goldman Sachs report suggests that Apple aggressively turn the screw on the rent-collecting end of its business, using bundling and anti-competitive retail tactics to crush Dropbox and other cloud providers currently serving Iphone owners.
The kicker to the piece comes in the final graf: "Rent extraction from a user base that finds it hard to go away may sound a bit like extortion. But it’s more honest and upfront than extracting data from users in ways they often don’t understand and then making money off the data, as Facebook does."
The poverty of imagination on display here is maybe the most 2018 thing I've read all year. Of course "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product" -- but as Bershidsky and Goldman Sachs agree, "even if you pay for the product, you're still the product."
Apple just had a really poor Q3 earnings report, with hardware sales falling off as people figure out that they just don't need to get a new phone every year or so; writing in Bloomberg, Leonid Bershidsky tries to soothe investors by pointing out that Apple is still seeing growth in "services" and that there's plenty more growth to be realized there.
Bershidsky is refreshingly honest in his description of these services: he refers to repairs, sales through the App and Itunes stores, and cloud services as "collecting rent" on Apple customers and its suppliers.
As Bershidsky points out, long-term Apple users are rather locked into its ecosystem by the tedious and potentially risky process of extracting their photos, music, etc to a rival platform. That means that the suppliers of things like music, ebooks, and videos are also locked into Apple's stores, unlikely to win a battle to establish rival stores that interoperate with Apple's Itunes and other apps, but which take a smaller commission on the sale of their products. Apple has inserted itself into the transactions for copyrighted works for the foreseeable future, passively creaming off a substantial portion of the profits from the sales not because their store is the best, but because they have used DRM and other proprietary tactics to lock out competitors.
A Goldman Sachs report suggests that Apple aggressively turn the screw on the rent-collecting end of its business, using bundling and anti-competitive retail tactics to crush Dropbox and other cloud providers currently serving Iphone owners.
The kicker to the piece comes in the final graf: "Rent extraction from a user base that finds it hard to go away may sound a bit like extortion. But it’s more honest and upfront than extracting data from users in ways they often don’t understand and then making money off the data, as Facebook does."
The poverty of imagination on display here is maybe the most 2018 thing I've read all year. Of course "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product" -- but as Bershidsky and Goldman Sachs agree, "even if you pay for the product, you're still the product."
no subject
Date: 2018-11-06 06:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-06 07:35 pm (UTC)У нас есть знакомая, она работает в крупной угольной клмпании в Сибири. Говорит там работяги с шахт берут кредиты и ... покупают дочерям и там женам последние айфоны. Вот так. Потом коллекторы удерживают у них из зарплат... и работяги устраивают бунты, типа "ааа почимуу нам зряплату оклада не выплачивают бла бла".
Но на такой целевой аудитории тоже миллиарды сложно собрать. Мне не раз американцы показывали кнопочные древние нокиа и с гордостью заявляли что типа "я в танке все эти ваши штучки вертел и вообще", видимо у многих это уже элемент стиля, не быть в Фейсбуке, не пользоваться смартфоном и т.д.