| > Apple used to have privacy as the differentiating and profit-driving factor. > This will immediately get thrown out of the window when it hurts profit This is the important thing I'm always trying to note to people that think incentives are enough (as I used to). You can never know what the incentives of the company will be 5, 10, 15 years from now, or whether that company or division will exist or have been sold to some other company. Incentives based on current conditions only matter for outcomes that don't have ramaifications far into the future. That's definitely not data collection and privacy, where you could find that 10 years worth of collected information about you has been sold at some future date. And lest anyone think they can predict the stance a company will have on a topic a decade or two later, all I can say is that any example someone can point to of
a company that has stayed the course we can easily look at point in history where a series of events could have gone the other way and they would be close to being bought out if not defunct. Even Apple had a period where they were bailed out by investment from Microsoft, and many other large names of that period were gobbled up. Always keep in mind, Sun was an amazing company with amazing products and engineers that embraced open source and competed with Microsoft in the enterprise market, and eventually after declining they got bought by Oracle. |