I mean if you want to dig into it, Apple is a company that makes most of its from money from selling tech. They spend a lot on highly effective advertising, but they pay actual advertising companies to do that. So I don’t think that qualifies them as an advertising company unless you’re just trying to be dismissive. You make your money from making and selling tech, you’re a tech company first.

Google and Meta make the vast majority of their money by selling ads and selling user data to other advertising companies so they can create their own targeted ads. That by definition makes them ads companies more than tech companies.

Microsoft sells mostly software/services to enterprise clients, they’re a B2B software company. Amazon too with AWS, etc. I read the other day that with how big NYT’s word games have gotten they’re more of a gaming company that also sells newspapers these days.

Anyway, yeah you can call Apple an advertising company or a fashion company or whatever but the fact is they’re more of a tech company than most of the other companies you probably think of as tech companies. Apple-produced tech is regularly compared to the likes of Nvidia, Intel, and AMD. You can’t say the same for the other top “tech” companies.

Wow this Jesus guy is starting to sound like kind of a dick

In all seriousness, respect for showing up with the receipts. I don’t put much stock in the book myself, but I learned a bit more about it today.

Only when paired with fava beans and a nice chianti

This. I’ll be the last one to defend any of these megacorps but folks calling it greed are being reductive. These are publicly traded companies which means their loyalty is to their shareholders and their #1 goal is to make them more money than they made them last quarter. So it’s more than greed, it’s their job within this capitalist system. They have to do that every quarter for as long as they exist. The only ways to do it are to increase revenue or decrease costs. If they can’t make enough money they have to fire people. That’s the world we’ve built.

But it’s not only about making more profit than last quarter, but also the amount the profits increased by has to be higher than the amount they increased by the quarter before last. That’s how you end up with companies seeing record profits and still laying people off. They made more than last quarter, but only 2% more. The quarter before they made 3% more so now people have to go. It’s insane.

“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…“ — That’s how you get Nazi sympathizer. For all the research you did it’s amazing you couldn’t find the one thing that was beyond you. Hope that helps.

The FTC Bukkakes Microsoft Over Activision Blizzard layoffs

CoD is the shoveled GaaS nonsense, and “everything we publish day one” has basically been their promise to subscribers from the start.

That’s the part that gets me with CoD. They make so much money on the backend from MTX and season passes that making it F2P via gamepass doesn’t seem like a financially risky move. And it could net them more over time than what they get from asking people to pay $70 up front on top of everything else.

But I’m guessing that with gamepass falling short of expectations they need to hedge their bets to help make the ABK acquisition worthwhile. It also explains them opening up more games to up front purchasers on PS and Switch. This is MS getting defensive after missing the jackpot on some pretty big bets.

Yep. Gog is probably where we should all be getting our games tbf. Being mad that a game is available on one drm store instead of another drm store is kind of silly. In either case we’re only buying the license and not actually owning anything.

I love bringing up the hunting aspect when people use the “but my ancestors ate meat” line. Like yeah they ate it after tracking it for a week with the strongest members of their community and killing it in a life or death struggle that tested the limits of their endurance. And even then they ate it sparingly so as to not have to go on another life threatening hunt for as long as possible. Not exactly the same as skulling bacon wrapped baconator burgers every night while binging Netflix from your couch.

? GOG is a drm free storefront. Doesn’t have anything to do with the age of the game. Plenty of new releases launch on gog alongside steam/egs/Ms

What’ll really aggravate you is that way back when cable was first rolling out, it was billed as paid TV service without ads (as opposed to the ad-supported OTA local networks). Obviously that promise didn’t last long.

It’s a tale as old as time. Its happened before, it’s happening now, and it’ll happen again.