The issue with banks is interesting but I think quite separate from those of PE.

There are several ways in which LBOs exploit our nation's smart, generous protection for capitalism and risk-taking:

1. When LBO shops take over a company and load it up with debt, the employees don't get to vote on the changed riskiness of their pensions. When the firm fails from the debt load, older employees especially get screwed despite the fact that they couldn't even vote with their feet by walking off with the contractual promise of compensation that gets abrogated. Oh, some of the loss gets socialized to the PBGC, letting ALL taxpayers subsidize the loss scenario.

2. There's of course unemployment insurance. Firms generally pay into state-run pools. When Bain cuts loose a couple thousand employees, the fund gets no additional cash and so still-surviving companies in the state pick up the cost for the “paid-in” coverage. Just a bit hostile to other capitalist operations.

3. Of course there are the suppliers, tax authorities and other stakeholders who get the short end of the stick when the firm gets hollowed out. That weakens other companies' finances, and requires the populace to pick up the tab for government services that the LBO'd firm received, but will not be paying for. More hurt for we the people.

If the LBO shops didn't ruthlessly exploit these social programs intended to support business overall, people wouldn't be so angry with the fact that sometimes, firms have to die. At a minimum, I'd like to see serial offenders — companies like Bain that arbitrage bankruptcy and limited liability for shareholders — be prevented from enjoying the privilege of going back to the trough again and again. If they succeed, great, but if they are basically flipping a coin where everybody else picks up a big part of the bill for Tails, it's basically a way to damage our economy for a couple of individuals' private gains.

That's why they engaged an independent firm to monitor.

Of course, if this happened in the USA, the OSHA investigators would've recommended changes, and/or some Congressperson would've held hearings where Cook would've been grilled. No such appears to be the case in China. The government could stand to up its game of showing how it cares for its own people. There've been protests, such as when substandard schools collapsed in the earthquake last year(?), killing kids. But the populace hasn't yet connected the dots between the govt and private employers.

My first job out of school had me heavily involved in quality control and safety concerns. At one of America's best manufacturers of toiletry products.

Quality and safety are linked in some interesting ways. We built incentives for high-quality — a single smear of non-toxic assembly-line grease on a container of a product that goes into your mouth was almost enough to guarantee no bonus for the month.

But never for safety, since we didn't want pressure by peers to not report an accident. The factory was proud of its lost-time work record; it spent the money to make sure it kept up. Every little accident was logged and reviewed for patterns that might show problems. It spent the bucks to hire me in part because of that. (Wish it'd worked out better for both of us.) Still, worker safety was never seen as contrary to profit. It was one of the company's values. Still is, I presume. I remember this clearly because it was drilled into us all. Safety is gnot just good, but necessary.

This company was NOT Apple, but everything in Cook's letter agrees with the experience *I* personally witnessed years ago, while NONE of your claims of giving up profits agrees with it. Apple is doing it the right way, from what I read, in requiring proof of policies in its contracts with suppliers, and terminating contractors who aren't honest about their efforts. I don't know Foxconn's policies, but at the bare minimum they are getting quite an education in first world standards from their business with Apple. (Betcha we hear a response from them, too, probably with a bit more of a culturally-acceptable “we're trying to do better” tone.)

No company can guarantee against all hazards, and China presents a special challenge due to an environment that doesn't value individuals much, but Apple seems to have taken a course WELL BEFORE this article was published, that is as good as it gets.

Got a big laugh from this post.

Not the topic; I care a lot about the topic. Rather, from the ad I see next to it: it touts a cellphone case that “provides maximum protection against cellphone radiation.”

There is exactly ZERO reliable evidence that people need to protect themselves against cellphone radiation. It's a snake-oil claim. Having no case at all supplies exactly the same protection.

I acknowledge that the statistics have not ruled out the possibility that heavy use could cause some biological effects, but the studies HAVE found that if there is some unknown effect — cellphones' transmissions CAN'T create the ultra-high-energy ionizing radiation that IS known to affect tissues — it must be very small, or it would've been found on the long-term studies of many, many thousands of people. Proving that there is zero effect, versus at-most-tiny ones, is essentially impossible, so the fact that no studies yet claim transmissions DO NOT cause issues, doesn't trouble anybody who understands science halfway deeply.

So it's funny to see lots of people comment about the evils of Apple's dishonesty, brought to us by a vendor doing exactly the same.

Thanks for sharing. This brings a lot to the concern about the integrity of the products we buy, and how our choices affect the world.

Bob, perhaps you'll describe the products in your household that are made exclusively under labor conditions that you have personally monitored.

Your TV. Your radios. Your phones. Automobiles; bicycles; bike helmets. Shoes.

Tables; lino floor covering; sink. Was your house/apartment built using sustainable wood products?

Now, how about the food you eat. Been to a large sample of meat-packing plants lately? Or are you a vegetarian who only grows his own or buys from local farms you can personally attest to working conditions at?

I'm not necessarily calling out hypocrisy here, but puhleeze: your holiness schtick is a bit much.

A week ago people were all abuzz about RIM being sold, merged or chopped up in pieces by a Vulture Capitalist. But today, the sun is shining, and all they need to do is execute on the plan of the last 4 years! Utterly amazing!

Truth is, market share, customer satisfaction and a clear technical roadmap for Enterprises and developers (the two major stakeholders in such today), are still disasters. There is a substantial risk that the shrinking market share makes their first-class BES and BBM irrelevant, creating a vicious downward spiral.

The way out is to effectively split the company along its major product lines, and let each fight it out for survival as best it can. BlackBerry Enterprise can be a great product if it's not limited to only working on a product that few employees will touch. Ditto, BBM could snag 50¢ or $1 per month from tens or hundreds of millions of users around the world if it'd work on low-cost Nokias, Androids and even iPhones.

RIM has tried to buy time on its tardy handsets by leveraging the software, but unfortunately that merely incents other firms to replace the software services — and Microsoft and a whole host of independents are doing just that. The handset business needs to focus on a target demographic that will carry it independently of the software. Today, there are still pockets of strength and identifying them independently of the loss of BES and BBM exclusivity will allow them to focus on what they MOST need to when that crutch is kicked out. Even the Playbook can survive if it's freed from association with RIM's high-price, Wall Street perception. It might be ugly — think Packard-Bell — but there's a chance that's NOT available if the company assumes that customers will buy into the hopeless tethered model, a model that takes no responsibility for its own success.

In other words, it's about each team taking some responsibility — that also means, “hope” — for its own success. I wouldn't actually tear the company apart; there are good synergies that'd be lost. But it DOES need a refocus on how it will survive the very ugly 2012 ahead of it.

I made the switch about a year ago. It *IS* a bit annoying to see lots of video that presumes Flash is the better delivery vehicle on a Mac; fortunately there's a “user agent” option to tell sites I'm on an iPad and if that fails, there's always Chrome— even an “open in Chrome” menu option to make it easy. (Getting ready for a flight, I have 50 Safari pages open that I want to read but can tolerate a crash of Chrome 'cuz I'd only lose a video or two.)

Adobe's recent announcement that it is giving up on Flash players for mobile browsers is a reminder that disruptive technologies — which is what Flash was: free user software for watching videos, etc., paid for by developers' tools licensing costs — don't always succeed. As long as Apple was just an asterisk on PC sales charts, they could get away with weak support. Now that we are in the middle of an explosion of mobile devices, all with modest CPU and RAM, it becomes obvious that Adobe was NEVER prepared to support multiple user platforms well.

Welcome to the Brave New World. All will NOT be perfect. But as you've seen, it can be a lot better.

True; no reason to scrap what you have.

But Flash on the desktop is marked, too. My employer's benefits page requires it (for no obviously good reason), but as soon as people start using Windows slates as their primary machines, and field staff can't see their 401(k) balances, UltiPro will have an ultimatum to fix it, or lose the business.

Ditto sites like the WSJ and NYT, whose (paid!) readership can't be too happy at being cut off from important parts of their on-line subscriptions just because they thought an iPad was the perfect device to catch up while on the bus or on a wifi-equipped flight where a laptop only works for the lucky few in First or Exit rows.

Now that site developers have gotten the wakeup call that they have been shunting away tens or hundreds of millions of prospective visitors by requiring Flash-capable browsers, why will they continue to shoot themselves in the foot by telling the customers that they were stupid to have bought a device that doesn't work on XYZ.Com? I suspect more people already access the web via a non-Flash-capable device than those with Flash, by bodies if not hours online.

Hey, it's software! Sites can change, and they will. You don't have to claim that Flash is somehow “better” if it doesn't run on all the machines your customers use. Adapt or die.

@DFT, there are many of us who get good generic web usage from mobile phones and tablets. My wife's iPad is a great thing to pull out when we want to see a friend's photos or find the Glycemic Index for Jerusalem artichokes. (Very cute and Go For it, respectively.)

But I think you've hit on something with the fact that apps are providing a better experience than generic web pages for lots of purposes. When it's safe, cheap, quick and useful to get an app built for something, why not? Maybe this points towards a future evolution of the desktop- and laptop-accessed web, too: quick, perhaps instant invocation of an app that seamlessly organizes and communicates as you want. Sounds pretty good to me. Not so much for generic Flash in webpages.