What made Microsoft so predatory is that they wanted to dominate the market and squash any competitors, and drive everything into a Microsoft monoculture. Apple doesn't act in the same way, and only seems to care about profits and products rather than marketshare. So even if Apple does something that seems incredibly controlling, you don't have to worry, because you can always buy somebody else's product. Microsoft was trying to make it so you couldn't buy anybody else's product.
Well, while they might seem that way because they are a hardware company, they are incredibly aggressive in that arena. Take the bannings and attempted bannings of Motorola, HTC, and Samsung devices for example. They are definitely trying everything they can to prevent you from buying someone else's product.
Exactly. Apple as great as their products are, have started to resurrect the look/feel lawsuits of the 90s with their patents on trivial things such as how to unlock a phone, having a jump bar, etc.
Sure, but only because they apparently don't have enough non-bullshit, non-FRAND patents with which to play the "IP litigation counter-counter-...-counter strike" game. Apple sucks, but so does every other major player in the "mobile" industry. I could be wrong here, but no counterexamples come to mind.
Slide to unlock was not a common place feature before it came out on the iPhone despite the prevalence of touch screen devices. It is hard to argue against the fact that the implementation was indeed unique at the time.
No, they're trying to stop devices they see as copies from entering the market place. They have no way of stopping competing but different things from entering the market. MS did and used it.
You nailed it - I lived under Microsoft's "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" philosophy for more years than I care to remember. Microsoft wasn't just happy being profitable, it only recognized success when it both destroyed the competition and locked alternatives from arising. It was core to their culture.
Apple has always made it very clear that they are quite content having a small slice of the overall market, just as long as they occupied the _best_ part of that market. They tend to be elite snobs, who seem to be fine with 90% of the market running linux netbooks as long as 10% are running Mac Laptops.
There's a bit of a difference between trying to kill the entire phone industry and suing obvious copycats who don't differentiate their products.
If Netscape has sued MS and won an injunction a lot of people would have cheered. Which brings up the old 'who's most like MS in mobile today?' question...
Microsoft made a netscape clone and gave away the product for free.
Google made an iOS clone and gave away the product free.
Sure, but there's an important difference between "giving away one product to sell others" and "using a monopoly position in one market to eliminate competition in another", namely, that the latter is illegal but the former is not. Grey areas? Sure, lots, whence so may lawyers. But IE and IIS were clearly (to regulators, not me) not mere loss-leaders, but prongs of a coordinated response to a perceived threat to Microsoft's PC hegemony.
Besides, Android device manufacturers effectively "pay" Google for Android in search traffic (or reduced revenue share from search traffic).
From what I've read on some blogs they never give numbers showing their profit or loss from Android, and looking at the situation from the outside I'd think it's more likely they're losing money on it at the moment.
>Sure, but there's an important difference between "giving away one product to sell others" and "using a monopoly position in one market to eliminate competition in another"
.... you mean like using a near monopoly in search to finance paying manufacturers to use Android?
I'm not so sure that it's ironic as inevitable. There are exceptions, but the winners of this marketshare game tend to be those who are willing to play at least a little dirty.
While Apple and Microsoft are very different animals with a completely different corporate culture, there are interesting similarities in their behaviour. That doesn't mean we should simply class them as exactly the same, as there are profound differences in their founding culture, outlook, and aspirations.
However once a corporation reaches a certain size, or perhaps in the process of reaching a certain size, corporations and other social tribes seem to acquire remarkably similar characteristics - the company becomes an ecosystem within which it is possible to thrive without actually serving the long-term interests of the company or customers at all - the corporate culture changes to one in which the most important achievement is to do well within the company, and others outside the company become a remote concern.
Perhaps this is inevitable when a company reaches the size of say Apple, Amazon or Microsoft - all of which have in their different ways abused their market position, and abused their power over smaller companies and competitors in order to make more money. They may not have broken the law very often, but they are all profoundly anti-social in their behaviour. All have tried to lock their customers in to ecosystems over which they have complete control (iOS, Kindle, Windows/Office), all have abused their power over their partners to make unreasonable demands, and all have ignored the long-term interests of their customers in pursuit of profit. They do this because they can, because no-one is stopping them, and because as a collective entity what is safest is for them to stamp out all competition anywhere - to completely dominate the marketplace (at least in the short term, ignoring that this is impossible in the long-term).
Perhaps that's just a natural outcome of capitalism, but as we have stronger limits in other areas of corporate malfeasance (for example regulations on pollution), we do perhaps need limits on the power of these larger companies in the marketplace which are stronger than antitrust laws (which seem to be unused and out of date at the present time).
We've seen Apple morph over the last 10 years (as MS did before it against IBM) from scrappy underdog to dominant corporation, and the transformation means that now they feel happy to arbitrarily ban partners from their devices (e.g. Google Voice, Kindle in-app purchase), sabotage their own production partners (e.g. Samsung), gouge partners with arbitrary licensing (iPod connectors), and ignore the effects on their users, or indeed on their own long-term survival. They are different from the Microsoft of the 90s (perhaps less cut-throat, a little less predictable), but in important ways are similar, and they're storing up the same sort of long-term resentment which is now undermining Microsoft in the consumer space. For example by banning all transactions on their devices which don't involve giving Apple a cut, they annoy both their users and their partners - the only entity this action serves is Apple, and that only in the short term.
