Saturday, December 29, 2018

FAANGs fall from grace


Facebook is struggling with their public image. The general public was stunned to learn that Zuckerberg was motivated by profit. They feel betrayed to learn that there was the equivalent of a video camera in what they considered to be a confessional booth.

Alexa from Amazon tracked our every move and those of our minor children.

Netflix keeps records of what we watch "to better serve us".

Google tracks us via Android.

So far the only FAANG with an untarnished halo is Apple. But one must wonder "for how much longer?"

Bella is convinced that Apple deliberately degrades product performance and codes in "glitches" when they introduce new products. She reloaded the OS. She dumped a bunch of Apps that might have been problematic, but now her older iPhone is becoming much less usable.

I long felt that way about Verizon. I believe that they degrade bandwidth based on the profitability of the customer. As a customer with an inexpensive, low profit margin flip-phone my calls are the first to be dropped when there is a lot of traffic.

What other industries would accept this as normal? Can you imagine an auto that offered lower fuel economy or safety or battery life when GM or Toyota or Tesla introduced the next more-whizbang, more profitable model?

1 comment:

  1. It is a documented thing that Apple does to degrade performance at approximately the 2 year mark. Their claim was that this was a "feature" to give users longer battery life at the expense of performance over time. It just happened to coincide with the release of a new model 2 years after the old model....

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