Comment by jmbwell
11 hours ago
I struggle not to have a cynical take these days. Of course he cared about the ROI. The ROI is access to an underserved market, a halo effect, a new community of adherents, a new reason for customers to cross the moat into the ecosystem… a modest investment with a durable long term return in multiple categories.
I appreciate that it’s a win-win for Apple and for its customers, and I firmly believe that accessibility features serve everyone eventually. I’m glad that there are some billionaires who also see it that way.
I guess I just wish we didn’t have to rely on rare cases of billionaires finding it in their own best interest to happen to serve the rest of us. Especially when the actual accessibility work and everything else is actually done by a whole class of people that never make headlines just for leaving their jobs and being replaced.
You're arguing that the action had some positive effects and therefore it was ROI positive. That doesn't remotely follow.
And most companies did NOT make the choice to be as accessible as Apple, which rebuts your theory that this was done only for the ROI.
Effectively you're so cynical that there's nothing Tim Cook could say or do that would convince you he was ever acting sincerely. It is comfortable to blame and rage but it is hardly good analysis.
It's obvious he has to be somewhat concerned about the ROI (or LOI) - if it cost ten times the value of the company to implement accessibility for the blind, it's not going to get implemented.
But the whole point of leadership should be to say "this doesn't bean count out perfectly, but we'll do it".
I get what you’re saying but in my 15 year career the ONLY time I was allowed to meaningfully work on accessibility was when visa hired me to remediate visa checkout. And that was literally because a tier 1 bank was going to drop their contract over it.
The ROI Apple will get is when all of us turn 70 and need these features we’re ignoring now