Slashdot Mirror
Is Apple The New Microsoft?
Varg Vikernes writes "Even if you don't count Apple's actions this week as a potential threat to first amendment rights (Apple's crackdown on Web sites that love the company), they do nothing to bolster Apple's public image. In fact the company's success of late has yielded accusations of bullying and potentially unlawful business tactics, along with complaints about the fact that songs purchased from its iTunes music service don't work with music players other than its own. According to Forbes, to some these tactics sound like something Apple's neighbor to the North might employ. They wonder aloud Is Apple the New Microsoft?
Dumb Ass,
There is a difference between freedom of speech and exposing the industry and trade secrets of a company that you have signed a non disclosure agreement or an employment contract with which stipulates that you will not do that very same thing. How and why is this even news. The only news here is that you are a fuckin' moron.
Techlander.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
How on earth does Microsoft make it difficult to use another browser? I downloaded Firefox with no difficulty whatsoever by using IE. Firefox installed correctly and copied my IE bookmarks correctly. After installing Firefox, I ran IE again and it did not automatically restore itself as my default browser. What, exactly, did Microsoft do to make installing and using Firefox difficult for me?
Oh, I get it. XP doesn't ship with the Firefox install. Cry me a river.
And the MS switcher ads - so what if the photos are fakes? 99.8% of all of the ads you see on TV feature paid performers who would otherwise have no connection to the products they are hawking. And it's not as if Apple "supercomputer for the desktop" is a paragon of truth in advertising.
The ultimate weakness of your argument is that it's the equivalent of saying that the genocide in Rwanda wasn't evil because they didn't kill off as many people as the Nazis did in the Holocaust. You need to step away from a black and white worldview and admit that Apple does do some things that are remarkably wrong, and that Microsoft (gasp!) does do some things that are remarkably right. Perhaps in the balance Apple is a much better "corporate citizen" than Microsoft, but this doesn't mean that Apple should be immune from criticism.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
That's the genius of Guy Kawasaki...
Turn people into brand name zombies and they will do everything in their power to shut you down. They are worse than religious fanatics because they don't even see what they are doing as motivated by a kind of insane zealotry.
Pullying the clones was a sensible move. Rather than expanding the marketshare of Apple's OS by attracting Windows-based users to the MacOS fold, all the clones succeeded in doing was stealing hardware sales from Apple itself, which was harming Apple's income. The clones experiment was too little too late to make any dent in the Windows juggernaut and was hurting Apple more than it was helping it, so it had to end.
Don't you see what an apologist you are being? You can reapply your logic to Microsoft and say that pulling support for Lotus 1-2-3/Wordperfect/etc... was a sensible move, because it was harming Microsoft's income by reducing the marketshare of Office.
The fact is, if Apple had 90% of the market share and behaved as they do now, they'd be employed in some pretty nasty anti-trust lawsuits all over the world. As other, more insightful, posters have said before, MS locks people into software. Apple locks people into software and *hardware*. Hardware whose price, I might add, is unvelievably inflated. But since there is absolutely no chance of any competition, the price will not drop any time soon.