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Comment by prox | Hacker News Reader

This seems like historical revisionism. Not saying Apple wasn’t part of a certain trend, but it’s an odd bone to pick since Apple technically is one of the few companies that relies on hardware sales, not ad revenue.

Google is far more likely to fit your profile. It’s where ads (adwords and adsense) started to transform the web. First just a few cute banners at the top. And these days some sites just plaster the whole page with them.

Even still it’s hard to pick any singular company that started to make tech suck, they all followed or initiated trends that made things worse from a consumer standpoint.

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It's hard to pick any singular company that started to make tech suck because it's a result of the economical structure in which these companies are trying to exist. The neverending search for more profit, more growth every quarter has made it impossible for companies to adopt a strategy that is not focussed on consumer exploitation, at least in the long run.

Agreed, they also calculate in “future profit” in the valuation and so you need to always hit your targets.

Agree. Ad-based businesses are eating the world. They hoover up data, invade your privacy, and then set up moats around their little fiefdoms (when they aren't selling your data to the other fiefdoms).

And every ad-based business has the same underlying strategy: steal from the finite amount of attention you have and use it to extract your wealth.

I think a lot of companies (including Apple) figured out at around the same time that the Internet finally allows them to have that unbreakable "tether" to the end user. The Internet provides them the control over what the user is doing that they never had before. Without intrusive things like hardware dongles and long distance modem calls, they were never able to watch the user and control their activities like they can today.

> relies on hardware sales

but apple made it a free-for-all on the device that you arguably own.

for example, you can block google in your browser. web browsing still has choices and is still somewhat democratic. But you can't block google in an app on your phone.

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