When I was a teen, my uncle, who was an executive at Oracle at the time, yelled at me for admitting on a medical form that I smoked pot. I said, "But, it's confidential, right?". He told me, "It may be confidential now, but it won't always be. Databases are forever." Apple won't be a privacy company in 10 or 20 years.
I think we are living at just the dawn of a long and very privacy obsessed era, that will probably become more intense as the decades pass, and the generations. I don’t see why a company that pounces on this reality now won’t be still successful at it decades from now.
Because, eventually, Apple will lose revenue, and their shareholders will demand profit. And, Apple will be sitting on a trove of data, or metadata, or predictive models built from that data.
That sounds speculative. Why will they lose revenue eventually? Do you think 40 years from now they will be in a worse position than today? After all, they are today in a better position than 40 years ago. Perhaps a privacy-focused company will actually perform better in a society obsessed with privacy, and eventually, their competitors who don't share these perspectives will be the ones that lose revenue.
It’s not speculation, just logic. Shareholders seek as much profit as possible. The moment that being PrivAAS is worth less than not being one, they’ll switch strateg
You're right that all we can do is speculate. That means that we can't assume things will work as they always have, or as they currently are. Which means you have to assume things will change.
