I am in no position to tell Apple how they should spend their money but after reading the articles about Elon Musk today I can't help but imagine how the world could be changed to become a better place with all this money.
And I don't mean that Apple should give money away to charities.
Why not invest in space exploration , electric cars, self-driving cars, medical devices, green energy,... It is not Apple's core business, but "phones" have not been the business of "Apple Computer" as well.
Apple has moved humanity forward with the personal computer and mobile phones. I don't want them to stop with computers, smartphones, tablets or TVs.
I want Apple to aim for more than just consumer electronics - but I guess we won't see that happening.
"Why not invest in space exploration , electric cars, self-driving cars, medical devices, green energy"
Why should they? Just throwing money at something doesn't guarantee success, and deviating from a company's core competencies can become a distraction that drags down the parts of a company that are succeeding. The dividend puts money back into the hands of investors that can choose to either re-invest back into Apple stock, or invest in companies whose core competency is space exploration, electric cars, or some of the other areas that wouldn't be in Apple's expected domain.
That's true, but the shareholders have delegated the decision on how to spend the money to their legal representatives on the board. There's a strong presumption that the shareholders have elected board members whose decisions they support, so if the board makes decisions and the shareholders don't vote them out, those are presumed to express the preferences of the shareholders. Note that those decisions do not have to maximize shareholder profit. Shareholders can elect board members who commit to maximizing shareholder value, but they can also elect board members with a variety of other preferences and ideas about how to best run a company, or how to best spend its cash on hand. The board can legally pursue a wide range of strategies, and shareholder lawsuits basically never prevail (in the U.S.) absent some kind of overt wrongdoing, like secret side deals made by board members or something like that, or else shenanigans related to mergers and equity (e.g. some kinds of dilution).
I tend to think of it as the board being in possession of the company that the shareholders have all but signed over to them; with shareholders retaining notional ownership, mainly enforced via the rarely exercised right to revoke the delegation of power if they get sufficiently angry.
So, the clarity you've added here is neat (I hadn't drilled down into the specifics of what "fiduciary duty" meant in law, and also had been using "maximize shareholder value" as a shorthand for it), but if you search, you'll find lots of instances of boards being sued for breaches of loyalty over company business decisions. Courts seem to find lots of ways to connect the dots between "putting the interests of the corporation first" and "not signing off on dumb business decisions, like giving the CEO a huge raise in a year where the company missed its numbers".
Regardless; Apple is not going to space, at least not until it can figure out how to make money doing it.
Board members and executives have a fiduciary duty. Executives and board members who knowingly and willfully undertake actions that decrease the value of the company can be held personally (financially) responsible for those actions. (That's why you purchase director's and officer's liability insurance.)
They have an extremely vague "duty of care", i.e. to run the company in a manner in accordance with the wishes of the entities they serve as representatives of. Beyond that, they don't have any specific obligation; shareholders can, at least in principle, have many different wishes, and so elected board members can represent a variety of positions, from an aggressive profits-uber-alles position to some kind of safeguard-the-brand-reputation-for-generations viewpoint.
The main enforceable obligation is a negative one, to not actively do things that benefit themselves at the expense of the corporation they oversee, e.g. by making decisions primarily designed to enrich themselves personally. Almost anything that isn't active wrongdoing is defensible though; if a board member thinks in good faith that doing X would enhance the goodwill towards the Apple brand, and in good faith thought that prioritizing brand goodwill was the best long-term strategy, it would be fine to undertake a short/medium-term money-losing course of action to pursue the strategy. Courts generally defer to board elections to resolve those kinds of disputes over strategy, since courts are very bad at predicting whether a given strategy is actually in a particular entity's long-term interests.
Insurance these days is more often directed at government regulations than shareholder lawsuits; board members have various possibilities for personal liability if their company is doing illegal things on their watch.
That is to stretch the definition of ownership quite a lot. Share holders have no rights to or control of any portion of the cash balance of a company that are not granted to them by the board.
The board represents and has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. The term "fiduciary duty" is not abstract; it has legal force, hence the frequency in the news of another investing term: "shareholder's lawsuit".
I think they're saying that it's the shareholder's money, which is absolutely true.
However that doesn't preclude them from doing good with it, even in money-losing investments, beyond perhaps shareholder revolt ousting the board. There's an oft claimed belief that corporations are somehow bound by corporate law to do everything in their abilities to increase profits/returns for their shareholders. That is not and has never been true. Corporations are essentially mini-democracies, albeit where your say is scaled by your ownership: If the shareholders don't like it they have mechanisms to deal with it.
Nothing prevents the shareholders from taking the dividend and investing it in cold fusion or flying cars. Then you don't even need to take a vote. You just give people their money and they decide what to do with it.
that's not true. it is their money - the shareholders probably just wouldn't like the move and as a result, apples stock price would plummet (but that doesn't really need to bother them - it's not like somebody's just gonna buy the currently most expensive company in the world). however what would bother me more as an investor would be that apple apparently has no idea what to do with all that money (how about expanding R&D even more, like microsoft? and develop the next gen input devices (after touchscreens))
Oh yes it better bother them. Cook and the Board have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. They can't just go spending money however they want without regard to shareholder wishes or stock performance.
The shareholders of Apple are the owners of Apple. They get the final vote in the end, although it has to be translated through boards of directors and management.
The Apple Board of Directors has a fiduciary duty to investors. If they take action that causes the share price to fall dramatically, thereby losing investor value, you can be pretty sure the Board will not last very long so yes it would matter.
A company? We're talking about Apple. I doubt Steve Jobs would have been caught dead saying that about Apple, and I hope that culture is continuing with Apple. Apple employees, notably Ives, have said over and over that their #1 goal is to create <magical products>.
I would say this is quite a lot of hyperbole. They have refined what others have made but they have not moved humanity forward.
The Haber-Bosch process, Norman Borlaug, the space race, the production of a silicon chip etc have al moved humanity forward. Apple in comparison made some trinkets.
You could argue that they have moved humanity forward in the sense of setting the bar higher for the sort of experience that people expect with everyday things.
Of course they are not primarily a science/research company so they rely on "standing on the shoulders of giants".
Maybe Apple doesn't feel they can be successful in areas other than consumer electronics. Trying to get into another line of business would be a HUGE distraction for management as well as the employees.
As for your green energy comment: I think Apple can do far more to promote green energy by being a customer and driving partners to produce better products than designing their own green business. For example, by buying a shitload of fuel cells for their datacenters, Apple funds Bloom's (or others') R&D efforts. Same with solar panels and other alternatives.
Because Apple's duty is not to pursue community goals. Furthermore, they don't have the competence to make those sorts of investments. Apple is not a philanthropic organization, and it would be to everyone's detriment if they were to act like one.
Apple has been successful so far with a very careful strategy: they focus on just a few markets at a time, only enter new markets if they have a big competitive advantage in those markets and only release new products if those products are a big improvement on the prior status quo.
If they were to spread management attention more thinly by starting separate divisions to do the sorts of entirely unrelated things you describe, Apple could easily turn into IBM or Microsoft. At its heart, Apple is a small company. The main way Apple helps all those other industries is by training engineers to think in the Apple way who then go off and found start-ups of their own. And by making lots of millionaires to fund those start-ups.
(Apple's also investing in some of those industries as a customer. For instance, they invest in "green energy" by buying solar panels for its new HQ building.)
At some level it's necessary for a company as tight and as focused as Apple is to maintain a cohesion in its corporate expanse. They could easily spend their money on growing the company in a myriad of ways. They could invest in pharmaceuticals or unicycles, but the farther afield they get from their core competencies the less likely they are to succeed, and the less likely they are to remain a single, cohesive company.
At the end of the day the key question remains: what is Apple other than just a big ol' wad of money? If Apple is something other than just an amalgam of various profitable enterprises then they should keep on being that instead of trying to be something they're not.
> but "phones" have not been the business of "Apple Computer" as well.
I don't think of the iPhone as a phone at all. It's a computer I always have with me.
Now, the main reason I always have it with me is because, rather than being an additional thing I need to carry in my pocket and always remember, it replaced a thing I need to carry in my pocket and always remember, but the "Phone" feature is the least used feature of my iPhone by far.
This is how Apple approached the iPhone, too. It was initially thought of as an iPod that had the sweet feature that it could replace your phone rather than require you to carry an extra device.
I guess we can ask which other sectors they could disrupt.
Education seems like a perfect fit. They could start their own publishing house to author first-rate dynamic textbooks for the iPad. The content could be better than it is in current books, and it would sell iPads to boot.
Why are you so dismissive? Apple is not the only company that has done this.
Many companies had MP3 players prior to the iPod, but it was Apple's device that completely up-ended the music industry. Now people have access to entire libraries of music on their phone, and a store where they can buy even more.
Can you really say the situation would be better if Apple had blown out in the 1990s and we were at the mercy of Rio and RealPlayer?
I disagree. But it's interesting that you mention Alexander Fleming (it's one m in his name, btw). Fleming actually has some similarities to Apple's role in technology.
Fleming discovered penicillin and its effects, but he abandoned the discovery because he was unable to produce it in quantity, and also did not believe it would last long enough in the human body to cure infections.
It took the work of several others, and fifteen more years, to actually produce an effective drug.
Similarly, those who made various fundamental discoveries and inventions in computing are certainly significant and worthy of attention, but Apple also deserve much credit for making easy-to-use, refined products out of these discoveries, especially over the last ten years.
Giving people better tools makes them more productive in whatever endeavors they pursue. It would be short-sighted to not see Apple's value to society.
Could somebody who has knowledge about data centers make a quick estimation how much such a data center might cost?
I am asking since I am not a data center/architecture expert but the Groupon site should not be that complex from my perspective? Also the content should mostly be static, so caching should solve many problems.
So 100KW of power, with N+1 power feeds, generators, full UPS backup system, etc. would cost about $500K to build. Would give you 10 to 20 racks' worth of power.
However, that is too small to be worth it, so they would probably build something quite a bit larger than that.
Figure 200 racks, each with 8KW-10KW per rack, that means 2 megawatts of power, thus 2000 * 4500 = $9 million for the building.
Figure $40K per rack to fill it with hardware (at a low estimate), half full of 100 racks is another $4 million.
Plus they have to manage construction, sign various contracts, pay permit fees, buy land, pay for fiber, etc. At a minimum they would need $20 million all in before serving the first byte of traffic.
1) The structure. These can be pretty simple, a concrete slab, then 'tilt up' walls tied together by steel joists. Internal structure is 'UPS area' / 'power ingress/conditioning' / 'data area' / 'office area' / 'fire systems area'. If its mostly data operations the bulk will be the 'data area'. The cost of land figures into it as well but you probably try to build it where land is cheap, connectivity is high, and power is cheap.
2) Power and Cooling infrastructure. This stuff is dictated by both the climate around the data center and the municipality. Santa Clara California used to have a bunch of semiconductor fabrication plants (fabs) which have all since closed. That left them with excess power capacity, so lots of folks are building data centers there to get access to the cheaper power. (land is still expensive). Cooling can be one of a number of forms, evaporative works well in the Bay Area generally.
3) Staff - Generally an electrician, a network guy, a security lead (+ some number of contract security personnel)
4) General 'stuff' associated with building a data center (raised floor tiles, sprinkler systems, power conditioners, big switches, UPSes and their batteries, chillers, more big power switches and transformers, generators (back up power), lights, etc.
I would be surprised if it cost less than $5M to build or more than $15M.
I actually put together a plan for a 'pocket' data center (one that could be put into an urban area easily, 1 - 3MW of power) but not surprisingly cannot find a bank to fund it. (its around $10M all up depending on initial land and fiber costs).
I was talking to a guy who owns a warehouse in Brooklyn a few weeks back. He said he was turning a relatively small part of it (a few thousand square feet, if I recall) into a residence, and leasing the rest. He started complaining about his prospective tenants, so I, sort of jokingly, suggested he build a small data center, since the lease revenue would be much better, even if the costs rise as well. Too bad you weren't there to close the deal!
So one 'take' on the cloud meme is public utility compute. I have never been a big fan, but have found the success of EC2 and its equivalents to be reason to doubt my doubt :-)
Back in the way back times the high school I went to shared a mainframe (a Univac) with all the other schools. They used it teach programming and to run various bits of accounting and grading and such. That installation could be an EC2 cluster now. (it isn't but the same reasoning for a shared mainframe would apply to sharing the districts computing tasks into a web2 style cluster.) Every time all the machines get stolen out of a school I think "Gee if they were just terminals and useless without the cluster, they would not be as tasty a target."
Still, not a fan, but like I said the ability to drop in a data center near the center of things in an friendly way, seems like a Useful Thing.
I have absolutely no idea what Groupon's load actually looks like, but as for actual datacenter cost, $1,000/sqft would be a starting minimum, and that's for a decent sized datacenter where some economies of scale kick in. Google supposedly spends as much as $3000.
One of the smaller datacenters I've ever been in was around 20-30,000 square feet. Replicating it probably would have cost closer to $3000/sqft than $1000, so you're probably talking about $40 million minimum.
The article says they raised 700M. Even if costs them 100M to build a data center, they can't use 1/7th of the money they raised, to build one? How exactly are they spending that much money?
A reasonable question to which I have no clear answer, but this is the company that tried to turn a $420 million operating loss for 2010 into a $60 million operating income by amortizing their marketing and acquisition costs. Perhaps they're still bleeding money on such costs?
For everyone who has not read it: Aaron is not proposing the future of ground-based transportation. This is an analysis why he scraps his plans for a magnet-levitation, personal transportation system and a call for new ideas.
To clarify, there is an urban density limit on this conclusion:
"Time to get to a station (walking, or drive plus park) kills the effectiveness of most personal rapid transit and light-rail systems until you have a population density of 5000+ ppl/km2."
So for population densities of 5,000+ ppl/km2 this might work (emphasis on might).
Interestingly, urban areas of the developing world might qualify:
The problem is that many of these cities might not maintain their high densities as their economies grow. My guess is that a lot of the high density is due to extended families living together. But maybe not, there are quite a few developed world cities on the list (e.g. London, Madrid, Seoul, Tokyo).
Unfortunately, I cannot vouch for the reliability of the statistics presented here, there just a result of a very quick google search. I've got to stop spending so much time on HN.
5000 people per square kilometer is only 20 people per acre, and any standard rowhouse neighborhood has 14 lots per acre, so this is only 1.4 people per house, a much lower density than you would get with large families or with multistory apartment buildings. A lot of cities that fail to meet this density are only because their legal limits also include a lot of essentially undeveloped land as well.
The overall trend worldwide is toward higher urban density, not less. This is more so in the developing countries - it's unlikely to swing away from this. As long as population is growing, the cities tend to grow (and become more dense) with them.
That is correct in the aggregate: people are moving from sparse rural areas to denser metropolitan areas. However, the urban density of metropolitan areas themselves is decreasing in the developed world. Most of the growth occurs in relatively sparse suburbs.
But, also, in the detailed part of the proposal, he points out that with high densities (e.g. NY city) you need so many maglev cars to meet peak demand, that parking them off-peak is a significant problem.
Yes, but they could probably be automatically parked in tightly packed parking lots far out of town. As peak approaches, they could drive themselves back into town.
Because the customer doesn't require a specific car, these parking lots can be FIFO queues or FILO stacks and won't require maneuvering space.
Also, the cars could transition to a much cheaper, non-maglev parking system. This might even be done using a robot to lift and store the car into a slot in an otherwise "dead" grid. One expensive robot that can move in 2 dimensions and a lot of simple steel rails is a lot cheaper than heaps of maglev track.
Finally, the 333k car estimate was based on a subway where there is only one place that people are leaving from. There was an assumption that EVERY car must return EMPTY to the source of the trip afterwards to pick up the next passenger. This is not true, the percentage of returning cars is probably much lower (30%?) And even those cars could be useful for part of this trip.
I think the question is not how fast you can go from idea to first line of code but how long until you find out that your ideas is worth a line of code.
That is an interesting question in itself and would start a whole discussion how easily you could test the feasibility of an idea without writing a single line of code.
I think Jack Dorsey is doing an amazing job and it is extraordinary what he has shown at Twitter and Square.
That being said, what we are seeing here is basically "story telling" and "legend building" in action. The same happened when Jeff Immelt took over GE and The story was "Look at that guy! The hardest working GE employee, putting in 100 hours a week. What a leader!" (you can Google it).
While I believe that Jack didn't craft a master plan for this, somebody is certainly putting some effort into building a coherent story that helps Jack but ultimately also Twitter and Square and therefore its investors.
And once again: it get's us talking as well, so I would say: Mission Accomplished.
I don't think this applies for this comment, I mean, the title suggests teaching something to an AI, which in the case of Siri would open a lot of very interesting options, I'm sure I'm not the only one who expected something along those lines and was disappointed. "RTM Siri setup instructions" is a less attractive title though.
I've seen the word "teach" used to talk about setting up or programming a computer on many occasions before. It's completely appropriate. I can see why you'd be disappointed but that's not a reason to complain.
The headline would be fine in a magazine article or a tech-light site like Lifehacker.
But, because of Siri's architecture, telling a forum of hackers that you've "taught it" to do something is a wildly different thing.
Hackers click that headline because they're interested in the possibility space where you can integrate arbitrary third party apps.
And when they discover that your headline is a semantic game --that the implicit promise of the headline is a lie-- I don't know how you could expect anything other than complaints.
When I saw the headline my first reaction was: What? Unbelievable, this sounds too good to be true, but maybe the guys from RTM really found a way to do that.
When I clicked on the link I realized it has not much to do with Siri and is just about synching other iPhone apps.
Last time I checked, there was nothing sticking up my ass, but I do come to HN because it is different from Lifehacker, BusinessInsider or HuffPo. Nevertheless I do have to admit that it is a brilliant marketing move. They even started a heated discussion on HN :-)
So to extend my comment from a hacker perspective I felt tricked.
From the perspective of an online marketer I have to admit it is a brilliant move.
Maybe you just need to be more cynical. :) I saw the headline, thought, yeah, they figured out some way to connect it, and got pretty much what I expected.
I agree with you about a lot of things, but this isn't one of them.
That title implies a number of things. Personally, I read it and thought "RTM managed to jailbreak Siri and teach it how to interact with a third-party API!!"
That was a very disappointing click-through because that's one misleading title, dude.
I think the problem is sometimes people try to find a way to comment. Generally unless someone is outright wrong or lying I tend to just not upvote something that wasn't very interesting. Starting an argument in a comment thread can be a great place for Karmawhores to get some action.
You tell Siri to add a task, and then it shows up in this other thing. You can quibble about just which entity is doing the sending, but that seems even more pointless than quibbling over "taught".
My quibble isnt with the word "taught", but rather with the overall wording conveyed in the title. As it is now, it seems to suggest that they've uncovered a hidden API where you can add custom grammars to Siri. A more accurate title would be, "RTM can sync with your iphone calendar". It really has little to do with Siri itself. Any calendar task will be synced, not just ones created by Siri.
in my opinion, "taught" seems to imply that siri can actively learn. though siri is an intelligent agent which does speech recognition (firmly planting it in the world of AI), i am under the impression that siri does not actively learn and so saying "taught" in the context of speaking about an AI could be construed as misleading. i could be mistaken about whether siri can do "learning" or not, as i'm not intimately familiar with the tech.
Actually, Apple could stop selling all of their products and they could keep their operations running until 2018, probably already 2019 after the next quarterly results are in.
It is often said that failing with your startup can also be a good thing because it shows at least that you have been willing to try and learned a lot. Frankly speaking, I always felt this mantra a little bit "too good to be true" and that if your venture does not work out, you are screwed.
But after following Chad (and also Paul) with their ventures (even though I don't know them personally) and I just feel like this is one example where it is true: Yes, it didn't work out, yes, a lot of money was invested and not earned back.But ultimately a lot was learned and Chad has shown his development skills and ability to ship something. The business model was not perfect, maybe the market was non-existant. But the way they have run this project and the way they are handling it now gives them more credibility than trying to hide a stagnant startup.
