Gabe Newell Quotes
I consider Apple to be very closed. Let's say you have a book business, and you are charging 5 to 7 percent gross margins; you can't exist in an Apple world because they want 30 percent, and they don't care that you only have 7 percent to play with.
Newell, Gabe. "Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions." Guest Lecture, LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, 30 Jan. 2013.
This quotation shows that in 1922 a major state prison was operated at a profit with NO COST to the taxpayer. They key was that the Warden was an experienced successful businessman who put the prison into a number of different businesses which paid the expenses and taught the inmates marketable skills like stone carving. The model however has been opposed by businesses in the area which saw the prison as competition and labor unions which saw the model as taking jobs away from honest, non-criminal workers and not paying high wages.
Most businesses attempt to gain monopolistic positions and avoid price and other competition as much as possible. See {633636} .
The company’s profits were $5.7 billion--$45,000 per employee. He then imposed a 6 year wage freeze on long term employees and cut the wages of new employees. His compensation has increased 80 percent in the last 2 years. Most large corporation CEOs do not share this need for “unlimited” profits. Most set a target and then try and get the corporate team to reach or exceed it.
Gabe Logan Newell is an American businessman and the co-founder and president of the video game developer and digital distribution company Valve. He was educated at Davis Senior High School and attended Harvard University in the early 1980s before dropping out to join Microsoft, where he helped create the first iterations of the Windows operating system. With Mike Harrington, he left Microsoft in 1996 to found Valve; Harrington left in 2000, leaving Newell as the sole owner. As of 2020, Newell had a net worth of approximately US$4 billion.
