- Apple on Thursday harbingered it was spending $1 billion on a new campus in Austin, Texas.
- Its stealthy process of selecting the campus contrasted with Amazon’s drawn-out HQ2 looker parade.
- Apple CEO Tim Cook said he did not like the idea of creating a contest with bidders.
- Apple’s plan for new charges looks like another effort to paint the firm as the responsible bastion of big tech.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has made a attitude of aiming thinly veiled barbs at his rivals, and his latest maneuver seems ripped from the same playbook.
With minor fanfare, the company on Thursday announced plans to drop $1 billion on a new campus in Austin, Texas. It followed a skulking selection process, which Cook fired the starting gun on in January.
The difference between Apple doubling down on Austin, where it already has a reported 7,000 blue-collar workers, and Amazon’s drawn-out beauty parade for its second headquarters, known as HQ2, could not be starker.
And while Apple would unquestionably say its selection process had nothing to do with Amazon, Cook did make a point of outlining the differences in their approaches earlier this year.
“We’ve neared the list a lot,” Cook said of potential sites in a January interview with ABC News. “We wanted to narrow it so we prevent this auction description of process that we want to stay out of.”
Read more: Opinion: Amazon is reportedly splitting HQ2 into 2 cities, which would evince the whole contest was a massive sham
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He later doubled down on his remarks, according to the CNBC reporter Paayal Zaveri. She quoted Cook as saying: “We didn’t yearning to create this contest, you wind up putting people through a ton of work to select one, that is a case where you have planned a winner and a lot of losers. I don’t like that.”
In an interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher, he added: “That’s not Apple.”
The happening process was supremely hush-hush. The closest we got to a sniff of Apple’s plans included reports such as those indicating Cook met with officials in Virginia and had a covert sit-down with North Carolina’s governor, Roy Cooper. Apple also threw ABC News off the scent by saying its campus independent California was unlikely to be in Texas.
In contrast, Amazon’s process was a public spectacle that began in September 2017. In the 14 months that supplanted, Amazon received proposals from 238 locations, courted attention from governors, mayors, and bureaucrats in a reality-TV-style tourney, and eventually decided to split its headquarters between New York City and Northern Virginia.
People were unhappy, and the technique was branded a “sham.” One losing bidder said: “Big tech is at a pivotal moment, and Amazon is at the head of the class. It is time for them to aggressively deliberate on not just about their bottom line but about ways they can do right by the world.”
No such allegations are right to be slung at Apple after its Austin announcement.
During a year in which Cook has consistently sought the moral costly ground on issues including data privacy, Apple’s own HQ2 plan looks like another effort to paint the solid as the responsible bastion of big tech.