I think we get too tied up in this monopoly crap. To be honest, I
don't think they are a monopoly - though I do think they have done some
things that are frankly "bad faith" toward both the user,
anti-competitive towards their own marketplace, and in some cases
boarderline blackmail. But a lot of those things relate to how they
have practiced iTunes and their merchant vendor policy. Apple's biggest
issues have been that "if they don't like it, it doesn't get in the
store".. this form of censorship was bad before, but under their new
agreements, they've eliminated out partner ads, sell through, etc. which
is something that has several newspapers and others furious - with fair
reason.
Their practices go beyond that in the music industry, though, where
independents have went from stonewalled to giving up higher cuts, and
studios (large entities) have been told that if they don't provide Apple
specific "exclusives" to attach to their titles, Apple won't sell, etc.
Apple also engaged in a price-fixing scheme regarding ebooks - which
threatened to raise the price of all ebooks for everyone, and put a big
hurt on Barnes & Noble and Amazon, etc. and got the EU involved.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/12/european-antitrust-regulators-investigate-apple-and-worlds-e-book-publishers-.html
I have no big issue with Apple. I use an iPad2 I enjoy. While Scott
may have one viewpoint, from an administration view, I really dislike
them, but then again, we don't deploy any of them in any of our
facilities. ( I admit, I'm still getting used to being now a corporate
IT head, and it's.. interesting dealing with divisions in every
continent in the world and six in the US.. big change of pace). But we
liked Apple enough that we switched over all of our manager to iPhone
and WP7 and dropped RIM (and killed all BB Servers) entirely this summer
- that was a big hit in some ways, you're talking deploying 300+
iPhones, 100+ WP7 phones. From that perspective, I can tell you that
while I admire the cool sleekness of the iPhone4/4S, the administration
of those devices is not nearly as smooth from a corporate standard as it
should be, and their reliance on iTunes and the like is often insanely
annoying.
On a daily basis, I deal with systems that run everything from Windows
Server, Win7, BSD, and hell, hell, then again, if I could kill baan, man
would I be light years ahead.
But I get the love for Apple. I don't have much hatred for Apple; I
think they are a good product that if I were recommending to someone who
just used the internet etc. as their primary purpose, it's ideal,
minimal hastle, etc.
Win7 is, frankly, MS's most solid product I've seen and thus why
adoption was good. It runs as it should, faster then you'd think it
should, and it's software library is immense. Apple gets love, but
you have to realize, as others point out, they are still 9% of the
market, so.. it's not as though tomorrow everyone is hopping to Apple.
Because Apple is a smaller marketshare and a single vendor, they can
control things that Microsoft can't. MS doesn't control if someone puts
Win7 on a POS desktop and so people have a bad experience. They don't
handle hardware at all. So, there is a difference..
I'm glad Apple is doing well, glad it's a great experience for them.
I do think what they have done with the music and book industry is
wrong, and I completely dislike their anti-blu-ray stance which is
solely aimed at taking on a superior format with a higher cost/lower
value format that they sell.
(seriously: I bought the Blu-Ray of The Help today for $19. All
extras, beautiful 1080P at high bitrate, great look, digital copy
available, tons of extras, my own physical copy. For a dollar MORE, I
could have had it from iTunes with 1/8th the bitrate, a DD5.1 (basic,
lossy) compressed audio, etc. So, why would you spend more to get so
much less? Oh, because Apple doesn't let you watch Bluray on their
units.. that's OK, if you buy it here at a higher cost, you can play it
back on your tv... kind of, as long as you have an AppleTV.
I don't know.. there are things I dislike about Apple.. but there are
things I dislike about every company I know of. I can't think of any of
them that are "right" all the time. And they are in it to make money,
so as long as they get away with it and people are dumb enough to go
along (I don't mean on the units, I mean on their irrational iTunes
pricing)
