Piestar

I’ve said for years that Apple would be a much, much worse company than Microsoft when it comes to monopolistic practices if they were the same size.  In fact it’s largely been down to their everything in-house, un-interoperable anti-developer attitude that has kept them marginalised and being The Beast of Redmond for so long.

It is unarguable that Apple is having massive success now.  Their unwavering focus on user experience in emerging markets has led to some great products that are, rightly, doing well.  Apple ‘get it’ when it comes to design and the fact that even now large amounts of people and companies think that it is just down to bling and marketing show how far away the competition largely is from understanding this.

That being said the latest action against Palm shows their true colours.  For those not following the story, when Palm released the Pre they made it appear to iTunes as if it was an iPod, thus enabling easy native sync.  Now Apple have disabled this little workaround in the latest release of iTunes, with this cute little note ‘addresses an issue with verification of Apple devices.’ Basically Apple do not allow any non Apple devices to easily sync with iTunes.  It’s funny how Apple does not make iCameras and thus all cameras can sync with their photo software, yet they do make mp3 players so feel the need to block competitors.

Lets look at Apple’s market share for iTunes (from Wikipedia):

• Steve Jobs announced in his “It’s Showtime” keynote that Apple had 88% of the legal U.S. music download market on September 12, 2006.[44]
• Apple announced that the iTunes Store had sold more than two million movies, making it the world’s most popular online movie store on April 11, 2007.[53]
• Apple announced that iTunes Store surpassed Best Buy to become the second biggest music seller in the USA behind Wal-Mart on February 26, 2008 and eventually became number one on April 3, 2008.[1]

So Apple, that biggest music retailer in the world, let alone online, is deliberately breaking and blocking access for 3rd party hardware to leverage sales of it’s iPod and iPhone products.  Isn’t leveraging a dominant market position in one market to assist a product in another market anti-competitive?

Didn’t Microsoft get in trouble with bundling IE with Windows to increase its browser marketshare?  Aren’t the EU still getting all worked up over this issue?  Yet what Apple are doing is not only considered bundling, but actively blocking competitors.

Look at the App Store.  You have to pay money for the privilege of developing software, then you are limited on what apps you can actually write to ones that do not compete with Apple’s own apps (and a bunch of other draconian rules).  Then once you have created your app you can submit it to be approved.  And if Apple do not like it for any reason (or even no reason) it’s tough luck, with no recourse.  So what you spent 6 months writing it – just spend another 6 months writing something else, maybe that’ll be approved.

The question ‘are Apple a monopoly’ and ‘are they breaking laws’ is entirely irrelevant.  Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, but their attitude and behaviour make Microsoft look like a box of kittens.  What if Microsoft decided that Windows Media Player would only sync with the Zune from now on?  What if they decided that Windows CE (or whatever they are calling the mobile phone OS these days) would only run ‘approved’ apps, and that you could only use IE on it?  What if Microsoft stopped iTunes from being installed on Windows?  The community of Microsoft haters would go utterly batshit insane on a previously unseen level before.  There would be an epic bashfest to end all bashfests and you wouldn’t hear the end of it for years.  It would be the new BSOD.

Yet Apple has a level of paranoid control that Microsoft could only dream of, yet everyone still thinks MS is the ‘big bad’ of the software world.  I just don’t get it – answers on a postcard.