Category: Global Business

According to Bloomberg, Apple plans to announce “subscription bundles” with its new line of iPhones slated to launch in October of this year. If true, it’s yet another sign that Apple is becoming the dullest of all tech businesses: a cash-cow-milking service provider.

The great American philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote that “every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” If he’d been a tech journalist he might have written: “Every great tech company begins as an innovator, becomes a de-facto standard, and eventually degenerates into a service provider.”

IBM, for example, was insanely innovative, becoming the first company to make digital computing practical outside of a laboratory. By the 1970s and into the 1980s and the PC era, IBM completely dominated the computer industry. It was the company of whom it was said “you’ll never be fired for buying IBM,” —

Were you heartbroken when your favorite restaurant closed, and then ecstatic when it reopened, only to be traumatized when it closed again? If that is how you feel, imagine what the owner behind the counter is going through. I didn’t understand myself until I met Chef Russell Jackson. 

This was back in March, in the early days of our new Zoom reality, and I was there to inform Jackson, the owner of the Harlem restaurant Reverence, that his business was one of the first recipients of Hello Alice’s $10,000 Covid-19 Business for All Emergency grant program to help small businesses through the pandemic. These calls are always emotional, but he seemed at a loss for words. Russell paused for a moment before turning to call his wife and son into the camera frame. “This is our motivation,” he told me, looking down at his child sitting in his lap.