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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?
I know god exists. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
We saw how Apple treated the clone system builders, and BeOS for that matter.
Apple decided that being driven out of business by clone manufactures wasn't in their best interests, and wisely decided to stop the licensing that was allowing that to happen. You'll have to elaborate on what they did to BeOS, other than not buy them.
[Apple is] a corporation, and frankly I'm not surprised in the slightest at their attempts to monopolise music downloads and attack their own fans' websites. Maybe Wozniak wasn't all about making money, but Jobs and the others left steering the ship certainly are.
You are equating profit motive with attempt to monopolize. All corporations want profit; that's why they exist. If they don't they are called "non-profit organizations", not corporations. There's nothing wrong with being a non-profit, but that's not what Apple is, and I'm sure their shareholders are very happy about that.
Apple may have the largest market share of the music downloads, but there is no evidence to support that they are a monopoly or are doing anything particular to try to become one. Oh, right, they make a good product that lot's of people want to use! Worse still, they advertise to help their product seem hip!!! That must be illegal!
Have you noticed that, althought Apple's own operating system owes a lot to the open source movement, and the thousands of developers whose code they use for free, you and I still cannot run iTunes on our Linux desktop to sync an iPod? No money in it for them...
How do you know they aren't working on a Linux version of iTunes right now? And are you saying they should do it even if they loose money?
Since you've clearly forgotten, Apple has contributed enormously to the Open Source movement. They were the first large corportation to publicly embrace Open Source. Apple has contributed huge amounts of work to Open Source projects such as gcc, OpenPlay, and others. The Linux community benefited from their porting Linux to PowerPC (MkLinux).
It's time some people took off the rose coloured hippy glasses and realised that Apple is just another wannabe monopolist who've (luckily for us) simply been curtailed by an unfortunate event perpetrated by the current software monopolist.
It's about time the parent took off the rose coloured hippy glasses and realised that there's nothing wrong with a corporation pursuing profit by producing and advertising good products. There is no comparison between that and attempt established monopolies to squeeze others out of the market by stealing their technology (ie: Stacker), conspiring to divide up the market (ie: Quicktime), and deliberately making competing products stop working with your monopoly products (DrDOS).
I'd like to know what the moderators who modded the parent up were thinking.
To MS' credit, when they steal an idea, they at least offer to buy off the inventor, ESPECIALLY if the inventor is a small to midsized firm.
Granted, if you turn down the offer, MS is probably going to destroy you, but they do offer to compensate the inventor first.