60 billion came off the Facebook price when political consultants got Facebook data. How much comes off the price if it's revealed intelligence agencies have your data? Peter Thiel is Dr. STRANGELOVE. https://www.indiatoday.in/technolog...tir-but-why-and-what-is-it-1209787-2018-04-11
All the big tech companies work with the letter agencies. Most of them were founded or aided by CIA/NSA/Military Intel seed money. And if you don't play ball with big brother, your company is quickly destroyed ala Blackberry
Blackberry destroyed Blackberry, by trying to be Apple. (ref. OS)... Blackberry was in fact *floated* by the US Government for a number of years, because of its perceived security (real or not) over the other formats/OSs. But your larger point (of DARPAnet funding deep into Silicon Valley/tech) is true, but somehow not so often mentioned. (IMO.)
this is on my reading list: https://www.ft.com/content/0adb8f04-1350-11e5-ad26-00144feabdc0 https://www.ft.com/content/0adb8f04-1350-11e5-ad26-00144feabdc0 The best business books to recommend Do you have a business book idea? Business books Add to myFT Review: ‘Losing the Signal’ by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff Tale of how BlackBerry duo saw the rise, then fall, of the world’s biggest smartphone maker Share on Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on LinkedIn (opens new window) Save Save to myFT David Crow JUNE 17, 2015 Print this page8 In the beginning there were two Steves at Apple: Jobs and Wozniak. Google had Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Yet there are few technology companies whose story is as much about a partnership as BlackBerry’s. The pioneering smartphone maker’s rise and fall is really a tale of the relationship between Mike Lazaridis, an idealistic electronic engineer, and Jim Balsillie, a chippy, mercurial manager. When Mr Lazaridis first started having business meetings with Mr Balsillie, he likened the experience to falling in love with his wife. It was Mr Lazaridis who founded BlackBerry, formerly Research In Motion, above a bagel shop in Waterloo, Ontario, in 1984, but it was not until Mr Balsillie joined eight years later that its fortunes started to change. The pair would go on to share power for two decades. There have been many books about the smartphone maker, but none of the authors has had the same level of access to Mr Lazaridis and Mr Balsillie as the duo behind Losing the Signal. Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, reporters at Canada’s Globe and Mail, have spent hours talking to the partnership behind BlackBerry, and it is what saves this book from being another dull corporate biography built from press cuttings and interviews with bit-part players. Unfortunately, the juicy, tell-all anecdotes never quite turn into the sort of corporate thriller that makes for the best business narrative. Too often, there are pages of leaden, technical explanation that will interest few outside the telecoms sector. Still, you find yourself rooting for BlackBerry as the book recounts how a maker of crude teletext devices became the world’s biggest smartphone manufacturer, accounting for one in five handset sales at its zenith in 2008. Now that BlackBerrys have become an endangered device for nostalgic fanboys, it is easy to forget just how much the company got right. When Mr Lazaridis was designing the early BlackBerry, he adopted two articles of faith. First, a portable digital assistant, or PDA, was useless unless it could connect its user to others. Second, less is more. In doing so he charted a radically different course to rivals, such as Palm, and Apple, which created the awful Newton. Mr Lazaridis and his team built a device that could do just one thing, and do it really well: portable email. Bankers and other business types loved it; consumers soon caught on. Yet the invention would have been for naught were it not for the salesmanship of Mr Balsillie, who did not so much deal with customers as wage war on them. If the qualities of its co-chief executives are what made BlackBerry, they also played the defining role in its decline. When Apple released its iPhone in 2007, Mr Lazaridis clung to his two articles of faith. Over the next few years, he would be on the wrong side of every big argument: physical keyboards or touch; small screens or big ones; less or more; apps or not. By the time they realised their mistakes, it was too late. The company’s attempts at a touchscreen phone, the Storm, and a tablet device, the PlayBook, were so bad they poisoned the relationship with carriers. It would never recover. Everyone knows how the story ends. Hands up if you are reading this on a BlackBerry. The writer is the FT’s senior US business correspondent Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, Flatiron Books, $27.99
Thiel and the. Nsa is ancient news. No one batted an eye because they were targeting immigrants if I remember.