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Businesses The Almighty Buck Apple

Apple Has Bought Over 100 Companies Over the Past Six Years, Tim Cook Tells Investors (bloomberg.com) 44

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook fielded questions on mergers and acquisitions, the impact of Covid-19, and the company's supply chain during a virtual shareholder meeting on Tuesday. From a report: Narrating a slide show, Cook summarized many of the company's new products and initiatives announced over the past year. He spoke about the latest iPhones and the growing potential of the Apple Watch, while noting that the AirPods Max headphones have quickly become "hugely popular" with users. He also discussed Apple's efforts to combat the pandemic, climate change, and the San Francisco Bay Area housing crisis. During a question and answer session, Cook said Apple is on track to meet its environment goals, including becoming carbon neutral by 2030 and transitioning its products to using recycled materials. He also reiterated Apple's recent privacy changes, including an imminent plan to limit ad targeting on its devices. Cook said the company bought almost 100 smaller companies over the past six years and makes a deal about every three to four weeks. Asked about gender pay equity, the CEO said Apple pays men and women equally across the world and has stopped asking applicants about their salary history to help ensure equity.
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Apple Has Bought Over 100 Companies Over the Past Six Years, Tim Cook Tells Investors More

Apple Has Bought Over 100 Companies Over the Past Six Years, Tim Cook Tells Investors

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  • Tag article "walledgarden" or "killzone"?

  • He also reiterated Apple's recent privacy changes, including an imminent plan to limit ad targeting on its devices

    Yeah, because they'd rather become the orifice [rmf.vc] through which they can control ad dollars on the platform, because "courage".

    (P.S. iAd was a total failure)

  • Competition, my ass (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @04:02PM (#61093692) Journal

    I wonder how things would be different if anti-trust was enforced and we didn't have big oligopolies. Oligopolies are often on the bottom of customer satisfaction surveys in different industries. Airlines, cable, telephone, cars, you name it: the fewer competitors the bigger their suckage.

    Those who talk about the "efficiency of the free market" often use the power of competition to explain why the "free market" is so great, but oligopolies have too few competitors, and usually slip and coast in both innovation and customer service. So, which is it?

    • Oligopolies are often on the bottom of customer satisfaction surveys in different industries.

      It's become a bit of a running gag in the Apple-adjacent blogs and podcasts that while Steve Jobs loved to talk about human-centric product design, Tim Cook loves bragging about "customer sat".

      While I agree that oligopolies generally lead to worse outcomes, the fact is that Apple remains at or near the top of nearly every "customer sat" poll in the markets in which they compete. There are some notable exceptions—I'm looking at you, Siri—but they're notable because they're exceptions to the gener

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        Early on they may focus on customer satisfaction, but if the pressure goes away, they'll slack off. Maybe Apple will always have the niche of "Cadillac of smart phones", but it's hard to say. If for example, something replaces smart phones (implants?) and they feel they're doomed, they could turn into sue-happy jerks like Oracle who don't seem to care about the long term anymore.

    • Those who talk about the "efficiency of the free market" often use the power of competition to explain why the "free market" is so great, but oligopolies have too few competitors, and usually slip and coast in both innovation and customer service. So, which is it?

      It's a misuse and misunderstanding of the term (or general poor English), that is all. Take highschool economics or any first year economics classes at university and one of the first things you learn is that "free market" has nothing to do with competition (it's about regulation, or rather the absence of) and that the what you thought was called "free market" is actually called a "perfect market" or "perfect competition". The true level playing field. [1]

      A "free market" describes only a market devoid of re

    • Is Apple part of some oligopoly? They tend to rank high in customer satisfaction surveys so your second statement would seem to dismiss the notion that Apple is one. Typically it's monopolies that rank near the bottom. If you look a customer satisfaction survey results, cable companies (which often have a de facto monopoly) tend to be about dead last, for precisely the reason you state. Lack of competition leads to complacency and if there's no one to take customers from you, how much of a fuck do you reall

    • "...the "free market" is so great..."

      Yep, just ask any Texan!

    • Some things require huge capital investment. Would you risk $10 billion building an electric car or 5 nanometere CPU manufacturing factory if someone can just take the company from you? Most people won't buy a lottery ticket unless they had a chance of making 100 million dollars from it. That's a 1 to 100,000,000 ratio. Do you think anyone would put millions into a semiconductor factory if there were a near guarantee to make big money from it? If you inject volatility into the market big capital investment

    • This. Above a certain size, companies should no longer be able to acquire or merge with other companies. Above a somewhat larger size, they should be forced to divest.

      Economy of scale is great, and all. However, past a certain point, it become poisonous to the larger society. Rule of thumb: "too big to fail" should not exist. If a company-shattering event would motivate the government to step in, then the company is too big. Apple has long since passed that point.

  • Layoffs (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @04:11PM (#61093712)
    Buyouts usually come with layoffs. HR, accounting, etc all become redundant even if you're keeping the programmers. One of the major problems we have with all this consolidation is that while it's great for efficiency it's terrible for unemployment. And we keep pumping cash into the supply side, which they either hoard (taking it out of circulation) or use for more mergers and acquisitions (or worse, venture capital leveraged buyouts).
    • There are not many HR and accounting positions left in most smaller companies especially tech companies as most of the HR and accounting task has been subject outsourcing in the past 20 years. I've previously worked for a start up with team of 50 that has only 1 nice lady with the role of admin/HR/Finance.

  • Buyouts are the new innovation? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bazmail ( 764941 ) on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @04:14PM (#61093724)
    Why do you need to buy out companies if you are so innovative?

    • Apple is courageously buying innovation wholesale.

    • It's cheaper to buy companies than license patents.

    • Having the people on staff to make it happen is a whole different ballgame. It is often easier to buy out entire companies than bribe individuals to jump ship when we are talking about startups backed by venture capital.
    • Is that bad? Big companies aren't known for being agile or great innovators. Bureaucracy takes over. So instead, some innovative people form a startup to develop an idea and their exit strategy to sell to a big company. (Growing their startup to be a direct competitor to Apple is a much longer shot, and not their goal.) Compared to a researcher at a big company they make more money if they succeed, probably less if they fail.

      Is this so bad?

    • For the same reason a company hires new people. Or do you think innovative companies shouldn't hire anyone since they are "already innovative" ?

    • From the MBA perspective, it's a simple math formula. Why burn expensive engineering time developing it in-house when you can just buy a company that's already done it.

    • A new neighbor a few years back said that Apple had purchase his database technology company. They were scheduled to live/work near Apple HQ for a few years to get the maximum payout. Presumably it was a necessary non-open source technology that Apple wanted to control to assist with their scaling.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dacut ( 243842 )
      Recruiting is expensive, and acquihiring [wikipedia.org] is often a cheap way for a FAANG company to get an established team that (probably) works well together working on your next new product. It's a wash for the VCs who invested in the startup -- when the startup gets to this point, their product was probably non-viable, so a true "exit" (going public or being acquired at a profit) was not happening, and it was this or lose their entire investment.

  • When I see the term "equity" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kaatochacha ( 651922 ) on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @04:34PM (#61093756)

    I ignore everything following it.
    It's like reading "running dog capitalist" in an essay.

  • You wants the short but memorable relations. We will have fun this night! I'm waiting >> http://gg.gg/oel32 [gg.gg]

  • Carbon neutral just means they massively overprovision and sell what they don't need. A high margin company doing that for PR is almost useless in getting a nation to 100% renewables ... raising the value of green energy a tiny bit does not help create a market for the TWh scale storage we need to go 100% renewable as a nation.

    Similarly recycled inputs will only raise the value of recycled materials a tiny bit, not nearly enough to get the massive investments we need to get better recycling of complex waste

  • Asked about gender pay equity, the CEO said Apple pays men and women equally across the world and has stopped asking applicants about their salary history to help ensure equity.

    Shortly before I retired from an F500 company a couple years ago, we were instructed that we should no longer ask about salary history. This still hurts my brain, but I understand the reasoning. Now, as a 20-something, if you're any good at faking your way through interview questions, you should ask for huge numbers...whatever you think they can afford and then some (as a starting negotiating position).

    Some of the "rules" about interviews crack me up. We had a consultant tell us that we could also not gi

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