And why can’t I buy Chevron, Sunoco, or Amoco to avoid Exxon’s evil profit-making?
Energy in general is known to be less elastic than luxury items. It isn’t as though people are running around saying Exxon is evil but BP is righteous and good. Anecdotally, I can offer you a sample size of one. I look at all the people buying apple products and I see people happily forking over cash for stuff. Stuff they don’t need. Maybe that’s a better way to look at it, the difference between want and need. You can’t possibly equate the utility of gasoline at the same level of need as an iPod.
My understanding is the App Store is free for free software. Furthermore, developers who charge are quite happy with the App Store as it is a very good distribution model for software. Where you can criticize Apple is the censorship of apps. There is a legitimate beef and people DO call Apple evil over it.
That’s a strange proof. Essentially you are saying Apple is ‘evil’ because it made 6 billion in profit. Nothing about Apple’s operations actually matter to you. That is, by your definition, anyone making 6 billion in profit is ‘evil.’
That would surely only work if there wasn’t a collusive oligopoly in place. I’m not saying there is, but it is somewhat naive to think that because other companies exist, there must by definition be competition. Last time I looked on the drive home, the price of gas at all of the different ‘competitors’ was next to identical.
There certainly doesn’t seem to be a vast degree of price competition in the retail gasoline industry. I don’t buy heating oil, so I don’t know if it is the case there.
Note - I am not saying that price similarity is a sign of collusion. But it certainly reduces the incentive to shop around.
We are not comparing energy and luxury items; we are comparing two companies. Feel free to substitute Microsoft in place of Exxon if you’d like. The reason I didn’t was to avoid the mac-pc debate, and because the similarity in profit statements (between Exxon and Apple) did not elicit the same rhetoric and ire. Ultimately, if I could crystallize this into a simple issue, it would be why we define greed the way we do, and what effect that has.
I’m saying to even be in a position to make that kind of profit, you have to be a huge company. Most huge companies started off relatively small, and likely grew to their current size over a long period of time. During that time, most put other companies out of business, fired employees, and leveraged any thing they could to their advantage. That process is likely to result in hurt feelings and “dirty” hands.
Oh. I get it now. You’re saying all big companies are ‘evil,’ why does Apple get a pass? I think Apple does get labelled evil to a degree (see comments about the App Store and censorship). I think the difference is severity of evilness. You started the thread comparing Apple (slightly evil) to Exxon (massively evil), so it makes the Apple evil look pretty damn good in comparison.
Why is Apple only ‘slightly evil’ while Exxon is ‘massively evil’? What is Microsoft? ‘Slightly evil’ or ‘massively evil’? Or something else?
-XT
Like Beauty, Evil is in the eye of the beholder.
This particular eye views Apple as a creative force. The Apple II, Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and iPad all served to move human-computer interfaces forward, and not always to Apple’s profit. Apple’s innovations drive the competition which is ultimately good for the consumer. I’m sure there is evilness in there somewhere, but I find it hard to get too worked up about it. Am I really supposed to get passionate that Apple censored an app for gay sex? I can work up a tsk tsk, but the Evil level is mediocre at best. Now the potential for Evil I can see, but again, yawn.
Exxon Valdez alone is probably evil enough to trump anything that Apple has done. There was some push against Apple for environmental reasons (Mercury!), but I have a hard time believing that Apple is more evil than Exxon on this point. I’m unaware of any extensive lobbying by Apple, which is to not to say it doesn’t exist, but I have a hard time getting worked up about favorable tech policies as opposed to lax environmental regulations.
Microsoft, like Apple, is slightly evil. Their reputation took a hit mainly due to bad PR and crappy products. Crappy products isn’t evil in and of itself, but it certainly isn’t going to garner positive opinions. I think Microsoft Evil is mainly manifested in its IE/Netscape shenanigans in the 90’s. That was slightly evil.
I’m willing to be convinced that Apple is more evil than Exxon, but so far, I don’t see evidence of it.
You should read the history of Apple sometime. They have used strong arm practices, have tried to monopolize their market (it used to be that you could only buy Apple hardware from Apple itself or from a very select number of vendors), and control their prices. One of the reasons there IS a Microsoft OS is because Apple refused to work with other vendors in developing software, so Gates got fed up and had his programmers develop one themselves.
None of this makes Apple ‘evil’…but then, I don’t consider companies to be ‘evil’, including Exxon. You think that because they had a tanker accident that makes them ‘evil’? And they have done nothing, in your opinion, to mitigate that?
-XT
Like I said, I’m sure there is stuff in there somewhere. But honestly, the stuff you state here are the reasons Apple was less successful in the 80’s and early 90’s. It’s hard to get worked up about Evilness that wound up shooting itself.
Like I said, Evil is in the eye of the beholder. The OP is about general perceptions and I offer without proof that on average people think Apple is less evil than Exxon. On Exxon Valdez, there is more to it than a tanker accident. The choices, policies, and litigation before and after the incident are adequate points for a case of Evilness.
Considering that we still see massive oil spills thanks to shoddy practices, no I don’t think the oil industry has tried to “mitigate” anything except by spending more bribe money on politicians.
You ever notice how we virtually never see massive spills of anything from ships other than oil? That’s because they have bribed their way into having lower safety standards than everyone else, including not having to use double hulled tanks like any other transporter of a hazardous chemical would have to. So yes; when the oil industry goes to great lengths to get away with sloppy and dangerous practices, I think they deserve the blame when something happens like the Valdez spill or the recent Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The computer industry just doesn’t do the kind of damage the oil industry does.
I don’t think the hate is for Exxon only. I think it’s for all oil companies, and Exxon just happens to be the one most mentioned, as they are the biggest.
The fact is that prices are rising at the pump for ALL companies pretty much equally, and it is not because their operating expenses have risen proportionately, because if so, they wouldn’t be making record profits - their revenues would be offset by the rise in expenses. The companies are all selling the same exact chemical, so it’s not like they compete with one another on features, like Apple and their competitors. They’re profiting almost completely off the back of the consumer, and the consumer has nowhere to turn.
On top of that, there’s the WAY the price goes up. If there’s some disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, BANG the prices at the pump are jacked up immediately, despite the fact that all the gas that’s there is already bought and paid for. It goes up quickly, and if that’s due to real factors (e.g., need for heating oil in the winter means less crude goes to gasoline), they are slow to go back down once those factors disappear. It rubs people very much the wrong way.
Apple? They pick a price point and stick to it. They don’t jerk around the price, and on top of that, competing companies’ devices don’t magically match the movement of their products’ prices. If their price is different from that of another company’s device, they can point to different features that might make theirs more desireable. There’s really no reason to be upset at their profits.
Well, other than the whole FoxConn thing. Nike certainly took a pounding when it sourced from certain suppliers and assemblers as a way of keeping costs down (and therefore profits high).
Um…no.
If you are making a profit of 10% selling gas at 1.50 per gallon, and they keep everything proportionate when gas goes to 3.00 per gallon, they’ll still be making 10%.
It’s just that the actual dollars they make will double.
The record profits arein dollars; they aren’t making a record percentage in profits.
[QUOTE=sachertorte]
Like I said, Evil is in the eye of the beholder. The OP is about general perceptions and I offer without proof that on average people think Apple is less evil than Exxon. On Exxon Valdez, there is more to it than a tanker accident. The choices, policies, and litigation before and after the incident are adequate points for a case of Evilness.
[/QUOTE]
Fair enough. I think you’ve answered the OP’s question.
-XT
Apples and oranges. 
Exxon (and Target and WalMart and Safeway) are all in high volume low margin businesses. Apple (and all other computer and software makers) get high margins because of risk. Exxon never bets the company - Apple always does, pretty much.
I think the real reason people see them as different is that Apple makes profits based on a real innovation, while Exxon made them almost automatically as a result of oil prices rising in the commodity market. They more or less got it free, not out of any virtuous behavior.
People object to Microsoft and WalMart, it seems, not due to their profits but due to specific actions.
If Exxon invented a better solar power cell, and made a fortune on it, I suspect few would say nasty things about them.
Such as what? iTunes- nope. Macs - nope. iPad - nope. iPod - nope. iPhone - nope. iBook - nope, except maybe the Air for the nonce. Kinda maybe the iMac. What, Apple TV or something like that?
Effective. As in, not literal or legal(government-enforced) monopolies. There’s really very little competition that’s worth anything in the iPad area(though some competitors are on the way), and unless things have changed, iTunes had a pretty thoroughly overwhelming market share. Just because competitors exist doesn’t mean there isn’t a monopoly. This was established in the Microsoft vs DOJ case over a decade ago.
That said, the Apple monopolies are not nearly as strong as, say, the Microsoft monopolies in the mid-90’s.
What does that have to do with my post? Do you disagree that the common definition of the “bigness” of a company is gross revenue?
It was established WAY before that.
In “the iPad area” I think you may be confusing monopoly with “useless product”. Nobody else is bothering to compete with the iPad because nobody actually needs a swollen iPhone that won’t make phone calls.