This is speculative, this is my view on the matter and it might be very very wrong, yet I see events take place and I have seen it all before, this is not a first. It has happened and it will happen again yet to be true I never expected Apple to be part of that equation. No matter how we consider the stage, no matter how we thing it will be alright. As I personally see it, it will not.
My insight started well over 30 years ago with a Dutch Company called ‘Infotheek’, an IT company when IT was a mere myth, it was rising and in that air it started to believe its own marketing. I saw some service person air anecdote after anecdote but never really managing anything, merely pushing the expectations of its boss unto the staff member on his watch and anyone not meeting presented and assumed expectations, that person was done away. They started buying companies and keeping the few stars that a company had and the rest, you guessed it, over time they were done away. It was slow enough not to raise flags, but the centre core was that they were purchasing revenue. I saw a pretty amazing sales star walking away from that. Even if I never realised it at the time, his name was Oscar, he had a sales routine and a calculator and he was doing tricks with the calculator and he was good, he really was. I never understood him, all I saw was some slick suited person with expensive sunglasses, but I was in services and happy to be there giving technical support. It was the golden age of Tulip Computers and I was aiding those users. Yet I saw Infotheek buying company after company, I saw people go faster and faster and it was my first view on ‘buying revenue’ but there were more later, when it became more common ground. These thoughts went through my mind as I took notice of ‘Apple buys a company every three to four weeks’ (source: BBC). The stage is similar, the problem is what path are they taking? Are they buying revenue “Apple recently delivered its largest quarter by revenue of all time, bringing in $111.4bn (£78.7bn) in the first-quarter of its fiscal year 2021”? Or perhaps it is a stage here they are accumulating cost to lower tax brackets? Are they merely looking for a cheap way to get the real jewels in a company, get the revenue and do away the rest? In this we need to consider the number one part, they are not doing anything illegal, yet the stage remains that the bought companies have a population of X, when within 2 years the population goes to X-45%, and when you see that this involves 100 companies, how many people will become unemployed? Even if we see “Most often, Apple buys smaller technology firms and then incorporates their innovations into its own products” we see a half truth, it is not the whole story. Yes, we accept that sometimes it is straight revenue like “Apple’s largest acquisition in the last decade was its $3bn purchase of Beats Electronics, the headphone maker founded by rapper and producer Dr Dre” and there is nothing wrong with that, but there is a larger risk that some people lose the foresight (or is that hindsight) that the Apple egg becomes like an actual egg, a hard outer exterior, but behind that it is space, empty space, not all of it is the joke (sorry read yoke) of the matter. A larger stage and in this case not some presented larger Dutch IT firm, but an actual behemoth that I set somewhere between $1,000,000,000 and $1,500,000,000 when that comes crashing down what will the impact be? And any firm that I in the stage of buying revenue is always heading for disaster and when it becomes someone buying another firm almost every month for 6 years that crash is close to a given.
You see, on paper it all looks nice, but incorporating new companies, re-schooling staff, educating staff on a new set of ideologies is a much larger task and the stage is alway in motion, the stage of confirming and checking whether the new people are on track of becoming images of the old people is a setting that takes time and when you buy a company every month the pyramid becomes unstable a lot faster than anyone realises and when that happens, good luck with finding support and services to your Apple product. In this there is one given, the sales people tend to forget about the services required and when they learn that their sales pipeline is stuffed because they forgot to give trust the larger stage of corporate valour it all goes pear shape rather fast.
In this I am speculating on the past, perhaps Apple will be fine. Perhaps I am all wrong and my experience does not count. So basically I could be wrong, however GeekWire gives us ‘Chromebooks outsold Macs worldwide in 2020, cutting into Windows market share’ (at https://www.geekwire.com/2021/chromebooks-outsold-macs-worldwide-2020-cutting-windows-market-share/) a week ago. This does not mean that I am suddenly right. A 6 year tactic is not the stage that is seen in one article over one year that is optionally the weirdest year of the century.
One does not imply the other but we need to take notice of both, especially in a stage where the 5G future is more and more likely to be a cloud based one and we cannot deny that the Chromebook is a pure cloud based solution. It is up to us all but when we consider that we need to realise that we too are wage slaves and service slaves and whatever hinders or threatens us will threaten all, a small truth that goes back to the age of Gaius Julius Caesar and for those who remember his name from the history books as a politician and a ruler, he was a general first, so he knows a few things, come to think of it, he set in motion some of the tactics that are till used 2 millennia later, all set before he became Dictator Perpetuo, think of that before we dismiss all of the facts and in this there are more facts, some are hidden in the story, it will be your puzzle of the day. In this I give you one small clue ‘Is Iteration in similarity the same as iteration and does that warrant consideration of the title iteration?’
Have a great day!
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 