Linked List: August 2, 2018

Thursday, 2 August 2018

Apple Closes With Market Cap Over $1 Trillion 

Jack Nicas has a good piece in The Times looking back at the last 20 years of Apple history, in light of today’s news. A few landmarks:

  • 1996: Apple’s market cap sunk as low as $3 billion before the NeXT reunification.
  • 2007: Apple was worth $73 billion when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone.
  • 2011: Apple was worth $346 billion when Tim Cook took the helm as CEO.

Apple closed today with a market cap of $1.002 trillion. That “.002” looks insignificant but represents $2 billion — about what the entire company was worth in 1996.

Everything Bad About Facebook Is Bad for the Same Reason 

Nikhil Sonnad, writing for Quartz:

Facebook didn’t intend for any of this to happen. It just wanted to connect people. But there is a thread running from Perkins’ death to religious violence in Myanmar and the company’s half-assed attempts at combating fake news. Facebook really is evil. Not on purpose. In the banal kind of way.

Underlying all of Facebook’s screw-ups is a bumbling obliviousness to real humans. The company’s singular focus on “connecting people” has allowed it to conquer the world, making possible the creation of a vast network of human relationships, a source of insights and eyeballs that makes advertisers and investors drool.

But the imperative to “connect people” lacks the one ingredient essential for being a good citizen: Treating individual human beings as sacrosanct. To Facebook, the world is not made up of individuals, but of connections between them.

Terrific essay.

Apple Will Soon Remove iOS and Mac Apps From Affiliate Program 

Stephen Hackett on Apple’s decision to remove apps from their affiliate program:

Another angle here to consider is money. Payments made to people linking to apps with affiliate links comes out of Apple’s share of revenue generated by app sales and in-app purchases. How much money it costs them is unknown, but the idea that the reasons behind this move could be financial in nature feels pretty gross. Apple is a for-profit company, and it may have a real bottom-line reason to close this program, but sometimes doing the right thing comes with a cost.

I don’t know what the explanation is, but sites like TouchArcade that are currently dependent on App Store affiliate program revenue are now in a tough place. I’d love to know why Apple made this decision. I don’t get the argument that it’s about Apple pinching pennies and not wanting to pay the affiliate fees. The whole point of affiliate programs is that they drive enough additional sales to increase revenue. That’s why Amazon has an affiliate program and heavily promotes it.