On 4/13/14, 12:29 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
I think a lot of Apple's success can be attributed to Steve Jobs'
tendencies in this area. I'm not saying that his sense of consumer
products and design style wasn't important but I think maybe his
general "management" and/or "leadership" style, might have been
equally important to the company's "success"?
One might discriminate between alpha behaviors and the scope of
selfishness. Some behaviors that are only good for middle managers,
others for executives, others impact company profitability, some have
implications for whole sectors of the economy, and then there is general
welfare.
If Apple preorders the available high-end Haswell chips for MacBook Pros
that might be argued to be unfair to smaller competitors. On the other
hand, it's worse (in my opinion) when a company has a product that is
cheap to make and they artificially make it slower or less functional to
preserve their high-end market, e.g. turning off cores or putting in
delays. In the first situation, the powerful company is pushing out
the technical frontier, and in the latter they are holding it back
because they can (e.g. because they have an effective monopoly on laser
printers).
That's one distinction that might discriminate playing hardball from
purely selfish behavior.
Marcus
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