Second Chance says:

It always amazed me the counterculture portrayed Apple as the alternative darling to the big bad commercial progency Microsoft.
Sure Apple was an upastart from the beginning. In a garage . The Apple 1984 type big brother IBM superbowl tv ad.
Yet Apple was more of a case of control and greed in its own way than Microsoft. It controllled and dominated its market and suppliers with a very strong hand.
Software compared to Windows was exhorbitant. Indeed Apple’s early coding was done by Microsoft itself.
If anything the PC world was and is more of an open source progreny than controlling Apple.
An intersting case of perceptions.

RTaylor says:

When was Steve Jobs ever such a saint? Like Gates, he never have taken any prisoners. You have to be an egomaniac to hold these positions, and that includes forcing your vision on the world. To them it’s the only way. These are guys that aren’t best buddy material.

doug says:

actually, nobody cares that Apple is a bully because their main target – the music and movie companies – would sue you for singing in the shower. not sympathetic ‘victims.’

also, iTunes music DRM is so laughably easy to circumvent that it hardly qualifies as DRM. so the ‘Dad’ in the article just has to burn his iTunes songs to CD and rip them back again as MP3s. that is one of the things that is pissing the music companies off, of course – they want it locked down tighter.

don’t get me wrong – I think Apple is leveraging its dominance to keep its dominance, especially the DRM in iTunes, which keeps the technophobic (and the people who bought videos that lack the CD roundabout) buying iPods. the various excuses Jobs gave for not licensing its DRM scheme are laughable and made it clear (to me anyway) that it was not copy protection, but rather iPod protection.

Problem is that the company which has the other huge installed media player base (Microsoft), cant find its ass with both hands when it comes to the market that came to be dominated by Apple. And check out Sony, which invented the headphone-sporting portable music player with the Walkman, but totally failed to keep up with the digital music scene even though (and because) it owns a huge catalog of music. there were smaller players, but no 800 pound gorilla.

so, Apple rushed into a market vacuum and took it over. Now they are playing hardball to keep it.

Sheik Yerbuti says:

Some differences between Apple & Microsoft.

Microsoft:

STILL dominates the corporate and consumer desktop computer market.

Produces the most ubiquitous office suite in use today.

Their consumer products, for the most part, suck.

Microsoft corporate products do not reflect consumer quality and performance levels.

Apple:

Dominates the portable media market, and is the 3rd largest retailer of music anywhere.

Has the finest desktop OS available today.

Makes appealing products.

Way too expensive for most budgets.

Leads the industry in product design and marketing.

BOTH COMPANIES: Have CEOs that have no idea what their consumers want…

Angel H. Wong says:

#6

Apple learned the Hard way not to squeeze customers too hard, they learned that when their Pippin game console came too expensive and with so many new features choked by too many restrictions.

Charbax says:

Apple is the most evil company in business today and I can´t believe the Apple fanboys standing in huge queues for a stupid piece of the ridiculously expensive iPhone. Apple products are locked, crippled, Apple does exclusive partnerships in almost every aspect of their production which is all that Capitalism shouldn´t have been. Unfair business practices are the business foundation of Apple today. Screwing the customer by overcharging and locking them down, screwing artists by imposing a closed music store on the industry and then screwing competitors which inflates prices for consumers and that´s the Apple cycle.

Li says:

There are two ways to get what you want. You can be a boorish ass who gives little but new ways to serve them, or you can find out what people want, give it to them, and use their gratitude to achieve your ends. The reason that people dislike Microsoft is that they often behave like a boorish ass, and, at least on the consumer end, Apple delivers. They command high prices because we know it is going to work, and it’s going to be easy to use. Now, Apple has been known to weild their lawyers like a cudgel at times, but given the early history of the company one can hardly blame them for their defensiveness. Hell, didn’t they only finally settle with Apple inc. just a year or so ago? That was the longest lawsuit ever, in my entirely uninformed opinion. 😉

bobbo says:

Capitalism –self centered lying greedy assholes.
Open Source–the opposite.

How you model the world affects that world in an anavoidable feedback loop. You get the society you model.

Computers, government, medicine, int’l relationships, your own personal relationships==open source or capitalism?

paulthe says:

While the world is going open source, Apple continues to stay with proprietary everything. This is so 1990, and yet it’s since as the darling of all the alternative groups.

Bizarre

pjakobs says:

here’s what really bugs me about Apple:

they get all the car manufacturers to provide iPod bays in the cars, either as an option or even as a standard. iPod bays, not some kind of standardized media player connectors. Where have the days of standardization gone?
There were days when car manufacturers would pressure the manufacturers of car stereos to agree on a common connector so owners had the freedom of choice!
I would love to see a feature rich media player interface, enabling me to control my media player from the steering wheel buttons, seeing the media player display output on my sat nav display, but I really hate to be limited to Apple for that.
This is a smart, fast moving company (Apple) using slower moving, less hip companies (car manufacturers) to limit consumer’s choices. Not good at all.

Almost three years ago, I bought an iRiver H340. I’m still happy with it even though it’s a bit on the clunky side. Back then, the decision against the iPod was made due to the fact that I can’t fill the iPod by just copying files to it. The more I look at it today, the more I think I’ve made a good choice, even though the masses gravitate towards shinyness and good marketing.

pj