
Apple's Tribute to Jerome B. York  - boundlessdreamz
http://www.apple.com/#tribute
======
acangiano
Few corporations would have the guts to do the same. They are essentially
trading money to pay homage to a member of the team. For this, they deserve a
lot of respect.

~~~
grinich
_Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring
to market good products. We trust as a consequence of that, people will like
them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear
about what our goals are._

Jonathan Ive, SVP Industrial Design at Apple

~~~
ugh
If you want to able to design and develop good products you need to be
vigilant with your money. What good is all that enthusiasm if you have no
money to do all the developing and designing?

So thinking that Apple would spend money in a random and irrational manner
even if this statement is completely true and the mantra every Apple employee
says to herself or himself every morning is probably a bad assumption.

(I think that Apple’s frontpage doesn’t make them all that much money. I bet
that if those who decided on doing this today were teleported to similar
positions of responsibility within amazon they wouldn’t have done it. It still
is a nice thing to do. You don’t even have to be all cynical about that, I
certainly don’t want to. Apple is just the kind of company which – and that’s
indeed pretty unique – can do stuff like that. They probably consciously made
themselves into that kind of company.)

~~~
jballanc
_I bet that if those who decided on doing this today were teleported to
similar positions of responsibility within amazon they wouldn’t have done it._

Then you don't know Apple all that well.

You're conflating money with opportunity cost. Apple operates with blatant
disregard for incremental opportunity cost, because they believe that the
greatest opportunity cost is the cost of doing something you don't believe
in...

~~~
rgrieselhuber
That's so well put and relevant to more than just Apple I wrote it down.

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toisanji
Very respectable that apple would change their whole homepage to pay tribute
to someone they care deeply about passing away. Image how much money they are
losing by not promoting their new products such as the iPad.

~~~
fiaz
I doubt they are losing that much money. I'm not at all trying to detract from
the sadness of such a loss, but there are links on the top that people can
use, not to mention direct links from search engines taking them directly to
where they need to go.

~~~
cmgarcia
Don't doubt it, they are losing a significant portion of revenue-generating
space on a commercial website in order to pay tribute to a fallen friend.

~~~
freetard
How about all the publicity they got from it for free? I'm sure visits to
apple.com got a big bump today thanks to that. Apple.com is on the frontpage
of every social sites right now (reddit, digg, hn etc).

~~~
cmgarcia
Even with added traffic, the conversion rate (visitors/buyers) given the
tribute and no products on the front page has to be extremely low. Low enough
that I tend to believe they are losing money for the sake of this.

~~~
freetard
Apple is a company that has billions in cash. Any amount of money lost because
of this won't do anything to their bottom line, something like 0.01% maybe
less. The amount of free publicity and props they got from that action however
are worth millions, I mean, just read what people are saying on this thread,
they're all praising apple. How much do you think that's worth as publicity?

~~~
savant
0.01% of billions is a lot of money.

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jakarta
Jerome York is a great businessman to study. He was involved in some really
fascinating turnarounds. After all, most businesses run into a few bumps along
the way.

I think one of the more interesting ones was with GM, in 2006. Kirk Kerkorian
had taken a stake in GM and asked York to be his advisor on the situation.
York gave GM some frank news: they needed to be put into crisis mode, sell off
Saab and Hummer, cut their dividend, and adopt meaningful restructuring goals
a la Carlos Ghosn at Nissan.

Now -- GM rejected practically all of these.

They bought out some employees, yes. But they kept Hummer and Saab, when they
should have sold them at peak earnings. Now they are trying to sell them at
trough earnings to no avail. The dividend was kept in place and as a result,
cash exited the business when it could have been used to pay down on debt.
Then, on July 10, 2009, General Motors filed for bankruptcy.

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shadowsun7
This is incredible. The last time I remember them doing something like this
was during the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

Oh, and in 2005: Rosa Parks. [http://theappleblog.com/2005/10/26/think-
different-rosa-park...](http://theappleblog.com/2005/10/26/think-different-
rosa-parks/)

~~~
hop
They did it for Al Gore too when he got one a Nobel -
[http://db.tidbits.com/resources/2007-10/Gore-on-
apple.com.pn...](http://db.tidbits.com/resources/2007-10/Gore-on-
apple.com.png)

~~~
protomyth
Did they also remove the bottom 3 ads for those? I thought they just changed
the center image.

~~~
glhaynes
Pretty sure they did for some, at least: I specifically remember thinking
"wow, they even took down the little 'ads', too". Not sure which, though.

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martythemaniak
"I'm Feeling Lucky" costs Google a lot of money too:
[http://hubpages.com/hub/Im-feeling-lucky-button-costs-
Google...](http://hubpages.com/hub/Im-feeling-lucky-button-costs-
Google-110-million-per-year)

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davidedicillo
Really classy

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quizbiz
What was this man's role at Apple? The wiki doesn't say much.

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mercury
whats the big deal? They didnt shut down the apple store. Its just the
homepage....

