227 replies
5h55m
For whom was in tech during 90s and now in 2020s, what are the differences between Microsoft back then and Apple now in terms of why the regulators are so "soft" against an actor that is overplaying it's hand for consumers?
I was not in tech in that time, but I was cognizant about the fact that entire segments of media and policy makers just dunked on Microsoft due to anti-competitive practices back then, and I recall congressmen and congresswomen, members of DoJ and so on openly talking about break Microsoft in pieces and I wonder why we do not have those conversations today in the biggest markets (China, US and EU)?
I think you have to appreciate just how egregious the behaviour of Microsoft was in the 90s. We're talking about systematic attempts to use their absolutely dominant market advantage to move into new areas and kill rival technologies, plus quite deliberate sabotage of open standards process to prevent the web taking off. (I knew a few people involved in W3C then and Microsoft's behaviour was breathtaking)
Personally I'd avoid comparisons since you're looking at one of the worst situations imaginable, so anything else is bound to seem less harmful.
So I guess apple learned how to be slightly more subtle, and to let their rabid fanbase do some of their work for them. It's still wild to me how they managed to get people to argue against the freedom to install whatever they want on their device.
Your framing is disingenuous by trying to frame this as an uneconomic and non-rational fanboying.
I don't think you truly appreciate how comfortable I am handing my parents an iPhone, and how uncomfortable I was helping them with their Windows computer replete with multiple spyware browser toolbars back in the day.
The onslaught of quasi malware on their computers was sickening, and they'd always ask me about insane popups that would show up due to some pre-installed thing nobody had control over.
Stop infantilizing adults. Teach them computer safety.
Cars have seatbelts, airbags, ABS, crumple zones, etc.
Almost everybody has to use a computer for work and other stuff, and they are willing to pay for a safe and sound system. They are not interested in becoming full time Arch Linux root administrators just to conduct their daily business on their device. Just like almost none of the people who drive a car are full time mechanics and welders.
They don't need to if they don't want to.
I'd be one of the users who are not inclined to transform my iPhone back into my days using Linux on desktop and suffering the pains of doing it. I do have the option to turn my computer into that if I want, I do not have that option for my phone even though it's just a computer.
No one would be forcing users into doing that, it's about allowing the users who want that control over their own devices.
You are attacking a strawman.
You have that option, just buy another phone. Because there is no monopoly. Likewise if you want to install a non-Apple OS, there are thousands of different non-Apple models available for purchase.
Apple offers security and convenience on their devices, which is why many people like them. Windows offers no security but some convenience, Linux offers security and no convenience.
Like I said in another comment, if Spotify is not happy with Apple they can manufacture their own device and sell to consumers. People buy and use Apple devices of their own free will, and developers develop for their devices of their own free will as well. And there is plenty of competition in the market.
Sure, I will buy another phone and all the apps I paid for in 15 years of usage. It's very trivial and simple.
I invested money in the ecosystem and now there's vendor lock-in, I'm bound to it unless the usage becomes so unbearable that the pain to change vendors is less than continuing the one I have, the pain threshold only grows for each passing year I'm invested in the ecosystem. Do you comprehend that?
Opening a phone for others to develop apps on top does not encroach anywhere into Apple's sale of phones, it just creates a massive wall to guard against other competitors selling apps to their platform. They charge for the phone, and now they extract rent from something they sold through the App Store. Please, think deeper about this, you are missing the point entirely.
No, they can't. That's not their business, they don't have the capital to develop and foster a whole 3rd platform of devices + OS just to move away from Apple's ecosystem, that's the whole point of developing a platform: creating a massive lever against competition because of network effects. Network effects are very hard to break from, hence why most major tech companies try to leverage that (look at Meta/Facebook, they are shit but still it's very hard to compete against due to their size).
There's only 1 competitor in the market: Android, manufacturers using Android are not 1 competitor each since none of them are providing a full platform, the platform is Android on top of some devices.
Free will is a massive naïvete to throw here. Is there free will when there are no other options to reach a market? Is there free will for online sellers in the USA to not put their products on Amazon since you'll be living on the outskirts of the market without any meaningful way to penetrate into it if other competitors have an advantage simply by paying the Amazon tax and selling their products through Amazon?
I think you are too naïve and ideological, that blinds you from understanding market forces and markets in general.
I know you're being sarcastic, but it is extremely trivial and simple to buy another phone. Because you can also keep the phone you have!
There is a hang-up among hackers that think it is impossible to use different phones, different computers and different browsers. You can have one phone for this and another for that. You can use both vim and emacs to edit a document and you can have several computers with different systems. Hell, you can even have different sets of cutlery at your home.
They sure can. Being incompetent or lacking in capabilities is an acceptable excuse for a person, not for a billion dollar company like Spotify. I have here on my desk a pocket music player of excellent quality that was manufactured in 2023. It is not Android nor iOS and the company making it is much smaller than Spotify. So why can't they? "Not our business"? If they're that incompetent, the CEO and the leadership should apologise for being failures, step down, pay back to shareholders all salary they have received and go hide away.
Yes there is free will for sellers to not put their products on Amazon. That's called retail, and it's a tough market. If your product is good enough you can sell it without putting it on a third-party marketplace. Just like with hotel aggregator websites and food delivery apps. Companies are doing fine without being there.
There's thousands of different Android phones in the market, that's the competition. And it's not that difficult for a tech company to develop their own mobile OS if they'd like. Microsoft made Windows Phone which many people liked, Nokia made the excellent and ahead of its time Meego OS, BlackBerry 10 OS was excellent as well. And there is absolutely no blame on Apple for these tech giants discontinuing their OSes. They were discontinued because they weren't profitable enough for the owners taste. So now Apple should be forced to make sure that their competitors can make a profit from their customers? Because that's the core of the matter. Other companies do not want to do the work and investments that Apple did to get a loyal customer base willing to spend money, so they're using EU regulators to freeload.
No sympathy to any of them. Make better ecosystems if you want to compete, you have the money and the means. Try giving a fuck about your customers and your business. That's something that the general public and consumers also would benefit from.
At what point should a private company be compelled to develop or expose APIs because you want to tinker around with their system?
My system, not their system, and since you're asking for a personal opinion here: immediately.
> No one would be forcing users into doing that, it's about allowing the users who want that control over their own devices.
The moment this is a thing is when the social engineering attacks to get people to root their own phones, to set up untrusted app stores that firehose shitware down onto phones, etc. starts to happen. "I'm from Microsoft, you need to add the Microsoft Store to your iPhone, here's how." I get your concern, and in a world less built on open grift I would share it, but our esteemed tech brainlords have built a tech ecosystem that exists to enable scams. (Hell, I almost got popped a few months ago by a scam, and I tend to be pretty cautious about things.)
Unless the opt-in mechanism is something like "open the phone and turn a jumper" or "buy a different model of the same phone" I genuinely think it's way too dangerous for the average target of a social-engineering attack. People buy iPhones to not deal with this shit as much as is possible; taking that away hurts a lot more people than it helps.
Hilarious, good one. How did you make the leap from "apple should allow people to install stuff if they wish" to "Arch Linux administrator"?
Be real.
They were being hyperbolic to illustrate a point.
Sort of like how you keep bringing up guns, knives, and car safety in a conversation about phone apps, to illustrate your point.
Back when he was still alive, I had to turn on "Parental controls" on my parent's Mac Mini, to stop my dad from accidentally removing things from the Dock and being unable to put them back.
It took him years to realise Google search results had a scroll bar, and it wasn't just the 3 items that fitted on the screen.
He wrote simulation software for the radio propagation of military IFF transponders before he retired, and his idea of "computer safety" was therefore somewhere between "do not connect them to the internet" and "put them in a faraday cage".
Okay, that's a nice anecdote. Is your point that no one should be allowed to have the freedom to install whatever they want on their devices because your parent was incapable of dealing with the responsibility?
Do you also want to take away everyone's cars because of traffic deaths? That's far more serious than someone's parent installing malware on their shiny digital toys.
What about taking away kitchen knifes? Those things sure are dangerous!
You're missing the point entirely. The idea of a "freedom to install" is incidental to what happened in the market which is that Apple made a platform that people felt secure and happy in. Consumers Apple's product to the extent that Apple became a dominant force in the market.
That's the house they chose to live in. It's a house in which no knives existed. Now you're saying "let them put knives in, how dare you restrict them from having a knife!" whereas most consumers are saying "I like this house, wow living here feels great.". It's not a knife issue. You're trying to make it a knife issue.
The success of the iPhone was never obvious from day one. To attribute Apple's success to monopolistic behavior and consumer oppression, rather consumer behavior and expression, is just denying reality.
And it is the "they" that I'm arguing against, not the rest of it.
That this isn't "infantilizing".
My mum did that for my gran when my gran got Alzheimer's and my mum realised she'd been driving for 6 months without paying road tax.
And then the same happened to my mum.
Also, you're giving the exact argument in favour of self-driving cars as soon as the tech is actually ready, and also the reason that crumple zones and seatbelts are mandatory.
And also the reason we have (revokable) driving tests to be allowed to use the vehicles in the first place.
https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives has a high degree of popular support, and has done since I was a kid myself.
No, that's dangerous! Everyone should crawl everywhere while wearing an iHelmet if we were to apply apple's modus operandi to transportation.
Hmm, so you think that maybe qualified people should be allowed to use dangerous devices? I'm fine with you taking devices away from your parents. That's up to you and your parent.
Is your argument that your iphone should not be allowed outside where it might scare other people? Odd take. Even in the UK an adult is allowed to buy & posses a kitchen knife.
I wrote "Back when he was still alive", so… no.
No, and I don't know why you'd think that. In fact, that's such a weird take, I think you wrote that in bad faith.
Buy, yes. Possess in public without "good reason" as defined by the police and prosecution, no.
This isn't the same thing. The equivalent in your anecdote is that Car A comes with a three point seatbelt that you don't want to use, and you want Car A to be sold without it so you can use your preferred safety device, despite multiple current owners of Car A telling you that they _want_ the three point seatbelt. And you can always buy Car B if you want to install a lap belt instead.
The young and the old can have cognitive impairments making this very difficult.
Would you give them a gun or a knife? Do you think no one should be allowed to own a gun or a knife?
My dad, when was a kid, would bust out a soldering iron and he'd show me how to swap out the quartz timing crystals on digital wristwatches to repair them (or, for fun, make them intentionally run fast or slow). On occasion, he'd even do it on PCs to under- or over-clock them and make them last a little longer.
By the time I was in college, he was on his way towards retiring, and knowing that I was into software, decided that I would be his IT support person. He went through various laptops and desktops (PCs, Macs, he even gave Linux a real try but gave up when he couldn't get his financial planning software to run on it), Android phones, etc. The one platform he liked using in his later years was iOS/iPadOS specifically because, in his words, "there's not a bunch of other s--- here, and I don't need to manage it".
It's ease-of-use dovetailing with computer safety, and that's a _hard_ problem.
Like the appstore is any better, remember that the vast majority of money made on the appstore is for casino-like apps which I would not be comfortable giving to my parents or my family.
Casino apps werent pre-installed. Do you really not remember what Windows computers were like, fresh out of the box, back in the day?
Hardware companies pre-installed any and all sorts of software from vendors. Spyware, adware, gambling games, toolbars, "free" trials to internet services. Computers used to be up to their neck in absolute garbage.
I do, people installed those malware by clicking on random ads, about the same way they now install those undesirable apps, funny how history kind of repeats itself.
I guess the biggest difference is that the OS manufacturer now gets a cut on those.
And yet for some reason my dad never has any malware on his iOS and iPadOS devices, whereas he always did on Windows devices.
Since you talk about this subject, I actually had to remove two calendar malware on two different family iPhones (and it was pretty annoying to find where to remove that, even as a dev) so while it's true that there's less malware, it's not non-existent.
And my point still stands anyways, the line between some of those top appstore casino-apps and malware is very blurry.
They also came preloaded by manufacturers like Compaq, HP, and Gateway, who got a kickback.
Talk to your lawmakers to make these sort of apps illegal. Apple is not the government.
I never said that they were, I'm just deconstructing the marketing myth that the appstore is a wonderful safe place of productivity apps.
"Better" != "Good enough"
An app store (any app store, not just Apple's) can be the former without being the latter.
My dad had installed a QR code reader app on his iPhone that was a monthly paid subscription. He was wasting hundreds of dollars every year for something his phone already did automatically for free by just opening the camera. Apple will happily let scammers create garbage paid apps to do the same thing their phones already do for free. No side-loading to let viruses in required.
He can also ping apple's support to get a refund on that subscription, which they will happily do.
Why should a refund even be necessary? What’s the point of Apple’s highly selective review process if they let apps like this through? The only reason that I can fathom is it’s because Apple will gladly take a 30% cut of that revenue. And that is my overall point here.
Everybody always jumps to Apple’s defense by explaining how iPhones are built for inept users that just want a phone that works with no BS. Therefore, they claim, it’s a good thing that Apple has a highly locked down environment. But what good is this locked down environment if Apple will happily allow scam apps to charge their customers for features the phone already does for free? What’s the difference between a user downloading a scam app from an untrusted source and downloading it directly from the App Store? If Apple is going to have a locked down environment, at the very least, they should make it effective.
Exactly. You gain a visceral appreciation for this when you watch your elderly parents get scammed for tens of thousands of dollars and taken of advantage of via technology channels.
We've created a very nasty internet - one that isn't safe for the old or the young - and without the law enforcement or age boundaries that we use in the physical world to keep our public spaces suitable for the broader population.
I wouldn't say the fanbase is arguing against it. Apple just have a good understanding of their average user. While you may have no issue installing unsigned apps and dealing with any troubleshooting, their average user, or most users, don't.
It's not to say they don't have a financial incentive to disallow app installs outside of their App Store, but there is a predictable cost in terms of support man hours and device troubleshooting they will incur in addition to lost revenue. So long as it is legal for them to continue business as usual, they have no incetive to allow it and the large majority of the userbase don't care.
These average users shouldn't come near a MacBook then.
Many years ago I used to despair every time I used my dad's windows machine. Every time, his browser window was filled with loads of toolbars installed by various sites and utilities, leaving him with a tiny usable content area. I kept explaining why this happened and he never changed his behaviour.
I got him to buy a Mac and for a few years things went well. But then he started complaining about it behaving weirdly or running slowly. I'd take a look and find he'd installed some free utility or some other odd bit of software that was screwing up his machine. I kept explaining why this happened and he never changed his behaviour.
I keep telling him to get an iPad, as at least then everything would be sandboxed and iOS would kill background tasks. But he says, no, he needs a real computer.
This is the end user reality HN generally fails to empathize with. Users need computing consoles or appliances.
PS. Now that you can dock an iPad with an external screen and keyboard and trackpad, try that for him, tell him it's the new Macpad Pro.
I would encourage the HN audience to do tech support (outside of family) for a few friends/customers and charge for it. You learn a LOT.
You should charge a lot. As much as a doctor. Because that's what you are, really.
The metaphor totally works because half your customers end up ignoring your advice anyway.
That's the real problem. People just refuse to learn. They refuse to put in any effort at all. They don't want to have to think about what they are doing.
It's making me become ever more elitist over the years. I no longer believe computers should be for everyone. Computers are world changing technology and they are wasted on people who don't give a shit.
And you feel like it is your responsibility to take control of his life, because you know better? For his own good? This is called fascism.
If this is how he wants to live, it is his right as a free adult. Even if it annoys you.
Average users, don't.
My sister does everything on a phone or tablet and doesn't see the point of a "proper" computer, the guy at the bank plugs an iPad into a monitor.
A MacBook is a work tool, like an angle grinder or a JCB. Most people don't know how to get the most out of them if they were given one.
I’m a computer nerd, and even then, all my actually-important-for-real-life computing takes place on my phone.
Why not? The average user can get a ton of apps from the App Store.
Statistically speaking, most of them don’t.
You're doing it right now.
I feel like that must be a sarcastic response without the "/s"
There is also the cost of externalities of more systems being infected that the rest of the connected world has to deal with.
Ahem, let me show you how that's not it :
Android and F-Droid user here. I choose to buy hardware that allows me to install what I want, but I also consistently advocate for the right of consumers to buy into a closed ecosystem.
There is a large class of technology users that is uninterested in installing whatever they want on their device. They want their device to be predictable, they want their app store to be curated, and they don't want to deal with dark patterns on a company by company basis. These customers choose Apple because it provides a tightly integrated experience.
Forcing Apple to alter enough of their rules will eventually cause that user experience to no longer be an option, which is bad for consumer choice.
The problem with Apple's walled garden is that there's literally zero consumer choice for interoperability. If you have 10 devices and 4 of them are Apple, it doesn't matter that 6 of them are running F-Droid. Anything that requires you to install your app on all 10 devices is impossible to do. Everyone is limited to what Apple allows in their walled garden whether they choose it or not.
Yes, if you buy walled-garden devices you won't have a great time trying to install things that were meant for devices outside of the walled garden. I can see how that is unfortunate, but I'm not convinced that it's an argument for tearing down the walls.
The alternatives that most here on HN are pushing for would ultimately lead to a walled garden no longer being an option for consumers at all. I think the status quo is preferable: consumers who don't want to participate in the walled garden can choose to not buy devices that are explicitly sold as being part of said garden.
Why do apple fans always come up with bizarre fantasies like this? This isn't a problem for Android today, and it won't be a problem for mainstream apps when apple is finally forced to open up thanks to the EU.
More than 99% of the users will never install anything other than from the official Play store. But they are allowed to without Big Daddy Apple telling them "No". And that's what matters.
Did you miss my first comment where I said I'm an Android and F-Droid user? It's not like I don't know how Android works. The only Apple device I use is my work-issued MacBook.
The difference between Android and iOS is that Apple actually has rules that are strict enough to motivate the likes of Facebook to actively encourage people to side load if given the chance. I'm not comfortable looking at Android as a precedent, because Google is extremely lax with what kinds of things they allow on the Play Store, so the path of least resistance is acceptable to basically everyone. I do not believe the same would be true of Apple's store.
Not really. They are pretty strict, actually.
I doubt it. Especially after Apple will have submitted to the rest of the DMA.
And those limitations are?
iMessage? The world outside the US doesn't use iMessage that much. It's Whatsapp, and Facebook Messenger, and Telegram, and Viber, and...
Apple Photos? I have Google Photos on my iPhone, and they work better and faster than Apple's own
Actually, I struggle to think what Apple-exclusive things I use apart from Safari (and I've been using it on macs since 2007 or so).
I can use WhatsApp, Signal, Google Chat for messaging instead of iMessage. I can use Spotify, YouTube Music, Sirius instead of Apple Music for streaming music. What do you mean by zero consumer choice for interoperability? I see plenty of choices.
What software is Apple not allowing? I see competitors’ software available on their platform. The only issue is that these competitors want to avoid paying fees to Apple and argue under the guise of protecting consumer freedom.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that users should be able to choose to remain within a walled garden if that's what they actually want. There are benefits to Apple being able to use their market position to enforce certain rules on behalf of their customers.
The problem is that same leverage can just as easily be used to enforce rules that benefit Apple at the expense of their customers. In theory competition from other platforms limits the extent Apple can abuse their position in that manner. But there's only one other major platform in the mobile space. That's not a lot of options for the market to optimise around.
Further, Apple is a large, vertically integrated company which does a lot to try to lock consumers into their ecosystem. If I'd like to chose a more open mobile phone operating system but feel like I can't because Android isn't allowed to interoperate with iMessage or AirPlay or AirDrop or AirTags or Apple Watch or iCloud and I like those products and want to continue using them... well, that's a problem.
There's also the software freedom issue. As a consumer, once Apple sells me a piece of physical hardware it should no longer be their place to dictate what software I'm allowed to run on that device. If I want to install an app that's not on Apple's App Store but Apple doesn't want me to, there's no question in my mind as to whose rights should win out in that scenario.
Overall, my take is that Apple should be allowed to offer a closed ecosystem to users who want that, but they shouldn't be allowed use technical measures or anti-competitive bundling to force or coerce consumers into remaining inside that ecosystem. If consumers want to buy their apps exclusively from Apple's app store because they see a benefit from that, then they should be allowed to. But if they don't, Apple shouldn't be able to hold their entire ecosystem hostage from the consumer as leverage to prevent them from leaving.
I realize this gives Apple a bit less leverage in their ability to advocate on behalf of their customers when dictating the terms under which companies can sell products within their walled garden, since those companies will now have the option of going over Apple's head and selling their product directly to consumers, sans Apple's rules. But that's how free markets work, in contrast to the monopoly-like situation we're currently in. If enough consumers see the value in Apple's rules to avoid other app stores with less restrictive policies, companies will still have to comply with them to access those consumers. (I'll note this is basically how things already work on Android. Google still operates the most popular app store on Android despite competition being allowed, and they're still able to dictate the terms under which apps are allowed in that store.) But if those terms are so egregious that consumers start to prefer alternative app stores instead, that's a good thing too.
This isn't because of Apple, or at least it isn't in my case.
Even as an iPhone app developer with the means to do so whenever I want, and even though I find Apple's content restrictions derisory and "big brother"-y, I actively don't want a system that can install "whatever".
This is due to all the malware everywhere on the internet, and owing to this unfortunate reality, also means I think it is unwise even to have 3rd party libraries as project dependencies. I have an entire spare computer dedicated to learning scientific python because I don't feel I can rely on the absence of vulnerabilities in the stuff.
This makes me sad. I miss the old days of 2002 where I didn't feel any reason to worry about random apps from random websites. But part of my carefree youth was that I had a Performa 5200 running OS 8, which wasn't a popular targets for malware authors, and another big part was that my bank didn't have an app.
But before someone replies to point out that malware gets past the App Store tests: yes, of course it does, I see all this as a "defence in depth" strategy, not a silver bullet.
Why would having the ability to install sideloaded apps change this? Apps will not be able to just install themselves or other apps without prompting. And we've already had zero-click exploits in Safari leading to entire phone rootkitting more than once without sideloading
Most of the apps I install are mandatory apps. It's not illegal to not have them, but if you don't install you can't access your doctor, file an insurance claim, bank, see your childs grades, enter the front door of your child's preschool, etc. All of these are malicious actors who will steal as much of my data as possible at all times, but I do actually need a preschool. As long as I can only install these through the app store, we are at an uneasy truce where these apps comply with app store rules.
Exactly my reasoning last week when I read about one more dependency attack on GitHub.
Do you have a mac? What's your setup? I need CoreML so VMs are not an option, and I'm a freelancer so I use my own MacBook for work. I have a different session for each client, but at this point I don't even know if it's useful at all. Of course I also have a personal session with banking stuff... which is what made me realise I was probably doing something dumb.
Yes, two.
(Well, three, but the third is in a box waiting to go to recycling or someone who wants it "for parts", as that's from 2013…)
It's literally an entire second mac. I bought an MBAir/M1 second hand, then was given an MBPro/M1 Pro; the Pro became my main machine, the Air became my "mess around" box.
It’s really kinda crazy how normalized it’s become to pull in hundreds of dependencies (aggregate of dependencies and subdendencies) from unvetted sources on the regular. Combined with the popular insistence of developers to run with all protections disabled (SIP, immutable system, non-admin user, etc) it makes for a whole lot of easy targets.
People buy product. People like product. People that don’t buy product try to change product.
Yeah, those linux and netscape crazies trying to stop OS monopolies and internet explorer bundling. Let Microsoft sell the better product to their users !
I own an iphone (because google is even worse) but I want to run Firefox
Unfortunately the impact is not limited to Apple product, but a wider ecosystem. For example the browser. If a feature is not implemented in Safari, as only available browser on IOS, every website needs to be compatible with it. Songs must be available on Apple Music if you want to be available for Apple owners...
I think it's a combination of subtlety and normalization in the rest of the industry.
Your post reads to me as if you thought all users shared the same exact needs as you do
That’d be quite an ignorant POV to take on IMO
Apple is predatory on a level that 1990s Microsoft could not have dreamed of, which is all enabled by Windows being an open platform while iOS is locked down with strict technical measures.
Microsoft would make competition harder by bundling "good enough" versions of competing software into Windows, with business deals restricting pre-installs of competing operating systems (if you pre-install Windows on 100% of machines, you'll get a massively better deal than when installing on it on 95%), and (arguably) by making interoperability harder by not having stable documented interfaces and having the interfaces change with new releases every few years.
That was bad. But Apple... Apple hasn't been just making competing harder, but outright impossible. It's one thing to compete against a free pre-installed product. It's another thing to try to compete when the platform owner straight out forbids you from shipping a product that competes with them, or applies draconian business terms to the competition that their own business units get to ignore. They weren't just making interoperability harder by not documenting interfaces, but (in the case of iMessage) by actively breaking any attempt to interoperate.
That's hilariously wrong.
In the 1990s, there were only two computing platforms to speak of: Windows and the Mac. Windows had *90%* of the marketplace. Microsoft had deals with PC makers that required them to include (and charge for) a Windows license on ever machine they sold. When Netscape happened, Microsoft leveraged their immensely dominant desktop position to squeeze the upstart browser company out -- Gates famously said "I'll cut off your oxygen supply," which is more or less an overt confession to monopolistic behavior.
Nobody has anything close to the kind of market power and predatory behavior that MSFT had in 1996. To suggest otherwise is to either display profound ignorance of that period of time, or to show you have a weird axe to grind about Apple that causes you to overlook actual facts.
Yes, Microsoft had 90% of the desktop OS marketplace, and did use that dominance to gain an edge in other markets. But despite that large market share, their leverage was kind of limited by the platform being open. Apple, on the other hand, has unlimited technical leverage. They can make up whatever anti-competitive rule they want to, and enforce it totally.
When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it. When Apple chose to neglect Safari in exactly the same way (and probably for the same reasons as Microsoft did with IE6), that was it. There was no workaround, nor any way for anyone to compete with a better browser.
PC games are a >$50 billion market, with Microsoft only getting a small slice of that. That's because Microsoft wasn't just able to outlaw direct installs nor competing digital games stores. Games for Windows Live had to compete against e.g. Steam, with the predictable outcome. The size of the iOS gaming market is comparable. Apple collects a 30% cut of it, and will do so indefinitely. Competing with them is literally impossible; nobody else can make a different app store offering better terms or a better user experience.
Apple is at around 60% market share in the US. The difference between 60% and 90% is a minor difference in scale. The difference between Apple's absolute control of iOS vs. the limited control that Microsoft had over Windows is a difference in kind. Apple got to choose whether competing software was even allowed on the platform. They could opening up special capabilities to only their own software, and actually enforce that (unlike Microsoft, whose undocumented APIs could still be reverse engineered). They can charge their competitors a 30% cut of revenue, while obviously ignoring it in their internal accounting for their own competing businesses.
IE and Safari are vastly different situations. IE started off with near-total dominance and was truly left to rot, with the teams responsible for it having been scattered across the company because Microsoft was no longer concerned with cornering the market on web browsers. Safari on the other hand has only ever seen ~20% marketshare, has never been truly abandoned, and at least covers core competencies well (recall that IE couldn’t even handle transparent PNGs without DirectX filter hackery). IE made even basic static pages a pain to develop compared to Firefox, whereas most of Safari’s significant shortcomings have to do with more advanced functionalities.
If Google got complacent and decided to reallocate nearly the entire Chrome and Blink teams to other projects leaving only tiny skeleton crews on them, allowing both Firefox/Gecko and Safari/WebKit to leave it in the dust in terms of features that would be almost a 1:1 analogue for the situation with Microsoft and IE back in the day.
Besides, IE was closed source and WebKIt is open source. So are all other engines. And web standards are really a thing now.
The late 90s early 2000s were a dark period, software-wise. Nothing compares to that, thankfully. People either forget, weren't there or were just oblivious Windows users.
Chrome starts a proposal, implements it and “intends to ship” it before anyone really has time to discuss it. Recently (2 months ago?) they introduced a new WebExtension API that nobody cared about nor really understood the need for, but it’s still there, making it look like it’s a “standard”
It’s far from perfect but no comparison to our lowest point in history.
The definition of what is a core feature and what is advanced functionality changes with time. When IE6 came out it was the most advanced browser available, including support for what was considered advanced functionalities back then. But over the long time IE6 existed expectations changed and things which were once advanced or not even thought of were now core. The same is happening with Safari, with the difference that thanks to Apples blocking of different browser engines people cannot just switch to another browser and light a fire under Apples ass.
My fear is that no matter how good Safari is or gets, it won’t be enough to withstand the crushing force that Chromium has become. Devs would much prefer to test against only one engine if they had the choice, which I believe will ultimately end up stripping choice from the user.
Many choices have already been stripped. My electric company’s payments portal only works in Chrome. When I called their helpdesk to say it doesn’t work in Safari, the person told me to use their iOS app instead of my phone’s browser.
When I told her I’m using Safari from my desktop she was confused. Her helpdesk script literally didn’t have a path in the reply tree for someone using a desktop and not using a chromium based browser. That should tell you how uncommon it must be. I guess everyone’s just using the App now and doesn’t notice.
At what point did Apple neglect Safari?
They didn’t chase Google to implement features that solely benefit ChromeOS, but iPhones have completely dominated Android and any other browser engine for mobile rendering performance since the iPhone 4. A miserably slow browser that can receive push notifications is pointless.
Exactly. People claim Apple neglects Safari because its priorities are not aligned with Chrome's.
Maybe not allowing a website to store GBs of data, run in the background or show notifications is a feature for some users.
It’s really only been in the past 3 years or so that I’ve started to see real pushback from Devs on Apple being overly pushy. Prior to that so many of the complaints were on the order of “Apple won’t allow me to do [insert insanely user-hostile or non-performant thing here] woe is me!”
On iOS, maybe. MacOS isn't controlled in that way.
And, again, if you don't like iOS or Apple's rules, there's another completely viable OS you can use on mobile that actually has a larger global market share, so there's no monopoly play here.
We have different definitions of long, and perhaps very different memories of the web from the years 2001-2012[0]
almost a decade for any real traction for competing web browsers to put a dent in Microsoft, and that is after the anti-trust trial and the EU browser ballot mandate.
Don't forget, it was so entrenched that even by 2015 IE had over 1/3 of browser share, really only defeated by Google Chrome (which had the infamous "kill IE" initiative[1]) in 2013 or there about.
To put it simply, a decade of dominance is a long time.
[0]: Data supports that Internet Explorer had majority market-share up through the first half of 2012 (globally), per https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid... and in North America, it held on to majority position through at least 2013.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...
As mentioned elsewhere, they didn’t get to 90% by selling to a free market. They demanded exclusivity across the entire PC market. They didn’t just let IE stagnate. They told Mosaic they would license their renderer for a percentage of sales and then gave IE away for free.
It would be like Apple saying if you wrote an iOS app you couldn’t write an app for any other platform.
You're comparing Microsoft's behavior now, after they've been smacked down in 1994 to how they operate now. MS had a long track record of breaking applications that competed with their offerings. If they hadn't been forced into the consent decree, they'd be 1)in a much stronger position than now, 2)behaving much worse.
<When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it. When Apple chose to neglect Safari in exactly the same way (and probably for the same reasons as Microsoft did with IE6), that was it. There was no workaround, nor any way for anyone to compete with a better browser.>
IE6 was released in 2001, after the consent decree. So the reason other browsers were able to compete was because MS couldn't kneecap them.
<Apple is at around 60% market share in the US. The difference between 60% and 90% is a minor difference in scale.>
30% is a huge difference.
<They can charge their competitors a 30% cut of revenue, while obviously ignoring it in their internal accounting for their own competing businesses.>
What does MS charge game owners on Xbox? Sounds like the exact same thing. Xbox dominates the US console market [1] far more than iPhone does.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/console/north-ame...
The platform wasn’t “open.” Technologies like ActiveX were ways that Microsoft was trying to make the Internet depend on owning a Windows PC. Everything surrounding IE was an attempt to make other web browsers completely unviable.
I don’t know if you remember how it was back then, but huge chunks of the Internet simply did not work if you weren’t using Internet Explorer.
They would also sink your PC OEM business if you dared to ship a computer with an operating system alternative. They used their 90% marketshare to force companies like Dell to only sell computers with Windows installed. If someone like Dell wanted to provide an alternative like BeOS, Microsoft could terminate their contract or raise their royalty rate to unsustainable levels.
This isn’t even remotely true. The entire front-end web development ecosystem came to an absolute standstill in terms of browser support for five entire years because Microsoft decided that, since they had killed off the competition, they didn’t need to work on Internet Explorer any more. That’s five whole years without a single new release of Internet Explorer, which had >90% market share.
And then after they restarted development, the next version mainly focused on adding tabs and a few CSS selectors. It wasn’t until Internet Explorer 8 was released that it actually started to properly move forward again. But web developers still had to wait years before enough people had upgraded because Internet Explorer wasn’t evergreen and people didn’t upgrade very often.
Supporting Internet Explorer 6 was still a battle developers were fighting in 2010, nine years after it was released.
Apple releases new major versions of Safari with improved support for web standards every year like clockwork. And people upgrade promptly. And Apple take part in interop efforts with other browser vendors. The two situations are absolutely nothing alike.
That's why Android marketshare is much larger than iOS marketshare and why Windows marketshare is much larger than MacOS marketshare.
After reading maybe 8000 posts complaining about Apple "monopoly" I just can't get my head around how hackers can earnestly believe such a thing.
It makes a lot of sense to me.
I think a lot of people were less affected by Microsoft’s actions than by Apple’s. After all, Microsoft didn’t stop people from making money off their platform or modifying their computers.
And Microsoft was three decades ago.
Apple is causing people far more harm now than they remember Microsoft doing in the past. (Assuming they were around for it in the first place.)
Edit:
I should have said "a lot of the people talking" instead of just "a lot of people".
I was around for Microsoft and would classify them as evil. The worst you can say about Apple is they are greedy. For all of Apple's flaws, they are competing in the consumer market on merit.
If by "people" you mean "a vocal minority of app developers", then sure. But the average iOS user not only doesn't care about Apple's app store policies, they actively appreciate them (whether they know it or not).
All apps being required to use a single payment system is a great example: it sucks for the app developers but only for the app developers. From the consumer perspective, Apple's app store is the only place in the internet economy where they're not subject to pervasive dark patterns trying to get them to not cancel a subscription, not back out of a free trial, or otherwise separate them from their money. People pay good money for Apple phones in part because Apple successfully protects them from predatory anti-consumer behavior.
Contrast that with 90s Microsoft, where people bought Windows because that's mostly all that was available (because Microsoft made sure of that). Today there are more non-Apple phone choices than Apple choices, and yet a substantial number of people consistently choose Apple.
I'm both a developer, and a user.
As a user I love the ability to easily turn a subscription on and off, without having to call someone/chat with someone. Also, did you know that a requirement of the app store is you can delete your data from within the app? It's a great way to reduce your digital fingerprint.
As a developer, we rolled out in app subscriptions and our revenue essentially tripled. They handle refunds. That saves me a LOT of time.
Perfect? No, but I do as most pragmatists do: compromise and make the best of it.
In Europe we can do that without Appstore.
Don't think anyone actually noticed this fly past yesterday [0] but as I commented here [1] Apple have set out their position clearly as patrician and protective (under the dishonest guise of "security").
This is right for some people.
There is a place for the digitally bewildered, like a kind of care home for those who've basically given up on trying to make sense of their place in the digital world, given up all agency, and essentially conceded control of their lives. Ironically the polar opposite of Apple's 1984 Superbowl advert [2].
But we really ought to tell them they're being put out to pasture.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/security/complying-with-the-dma....
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39580678
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_(advertisement)
This is incredible whitewashing of Microsoft. Microsoft didn’t stop people from modifying their computers? Part of the anti trust case was Microsoft ending licenses with OEMs if they dared to sell a PC with Linux installed.
I was referring to after purchase. Wasn't it still possible to install Linux on computers that came with Windows?
Granted, drivers were a massive issue.
And if anything, this only furthers the point that Apple isn't anything close to what Microsoft was doing.
That is literally what they did.
Be built a business, lined up customers, and had every one of them fail because of exclusivity agreements with Microsoft. Unless you were a vertically integrated software/hardware business you couldn’t get your OS on PCs because of Microsoft.
It might seem quaint now, but there was a market for web browsers! They weren’t free until Microsoft duped Mosaic into giving them a license for a percentage of sales and then gave it away for free as Internet Explorer, instantly destroying any market for selling web browsers. That’s not only preventing others from making money on their platform, but anyone from making money in that entire segment.
Literally the entire world was affected by Microsoft’s business practices as the PC industry was booming.
This isn't about marketshare, it's about Apple making things impossible. You're a hacker, tell me how I can solve this problem:
I am with a friend in a place with no Internet access. They have an iPhone. I have an Android phone. We don't have any cables. My friend took a video and I would like them to send me the video right now over Wifi.
I think there are some ways I could solve it, but I don't think there are any ways I could solve it that would be reliable for nontechnical users (and even for me it's hard.) This isn't an accident, Apple is abusing their control over iOS to make this sort of thing impossible. And it's worse than anything Microsoft ever did. Apple is actively standing in my way, even though I don't own any iOS devices.
Of course it is about marketshare. The more you have, the more you can make things hard for your competitors. The less you have, the more you're the weird one with the odd platform.
That's a vanishingly rare situation not worthy of legislation, IMO.
You've been able to access SMB shares from the Files app just fine for years now. Linux supports SMB. Windows supports SMB. You're welcome.
In 2003 I bought a PowerBook. It was the only commercially available laptop that could be bought without buying a Windows license. Microsoft had put any competitors out of business by that point and OEMs weren’t ready to sell Linux laptops. Apple only existed because Microsoft injected them with cash to show they had a competitor.
Get a USB drive.
Without prior downloads happening before going offline I’m not sure you could share a file between mobile operating systems out of the box, regardless of which OS is trying to supply the file.
If I’m allowed to pre-download software before encountering your scenario, running a web server or an app that serves FTP or other server types hosting files is trivial on either OS. iOS may require shuffling the video file into an app sandbox first.
The answer is obvious, play the video on one phone and film the screen with the other.
Feem, but I'm interested to learn more about this contrived example where phones don't have internet access and so can't use SHAREit, Send Anywhere, or any number of other solutions.
Think in terms of market power, not share.
Implicit to that statement is "on apple machines".
Android market share is on non-macs, an non-iphones.
I’m not sure if you lived it, but Microsoft was actively targeting companies to destroy, and destroying companies because they could. Read about Mosaic, Be, their role in the SCO case, the Halloween documents, the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish philosophy.
Their monopoly case wasn’t about draconian terms. They were savagely destroying competition as a company culture.
Edit to add: bad terms on a vertically integrated platform is cute compared to Microsoft dictating what the entire PC industry was allowed to sell. It’s not that Windows was the best game in town, it was that vendors couldn’t sell Windows pre-installed if they sold anything else.
I do remember Steve Jobs wanted "to go thermonuclear" on Android (mostly Samsung and Google), saying "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product."
Other motives, same behavior.
If you are absolutely committed to doing zero further analysis, then sure I can see why you would think that.
No, different behaviour. If Apple had announced its own Android derivative called Apple Android++, somehow forced all major OEMs to pre-install it, designed it such that 'Android' apps written for it wouldn't work on real Android, then killed it, that might be the sort of behaviour that would be closer to the mark.
Like, Steve Jobs making vague threats isn't really in the same league as what MS was getting up to in the 90s.
Similar behavior would have been to go to all of the retailers and say they couldn’t sell iPhones if they sold Android phones.
Apple sued for patent infringement and that was about the extent of it.
Suggesting that their behavior is at Microsoft’s level is naive.
Different results. MS was pretty effective at destroying the competition.
It is possible (and is) for both things to be true.
Both Apple and Microsoft were/are abusive of their market position.
It’s about the difference between someone saying something mean to people and someone killing people. Sure, they are both socially unacceptable, but we typically don’t equate those.
At the time Microsoft was caught logging all communication in computers was new and business leaders hadn't adapted to it, but today you want catch them with their pants down like that, so today we wouldn't know if Apple or Microsoft were deliberately targeting and killing companies since they know to say "We are doing this to serve the customer, killing that company was just an unfortunate side effect" and they know the US court wont go after them.
example https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/
msft forced PC makers to ship bootloaders that would lockup on sight of Be's boot chain
They literally left comments in their code saying, "we should crash here if using DR-DOS". Digital Research had a compatible but different DOS implementation at the time.
EEE is still very much alive nowadays, especially how they got into Linux spaces with WSL(2) and into the wider FLOSS community with the GitHub acquisition. We're just in the Extend phase at the moment.
Apple doesn’t have 90% of the phone or computer markets. Microsoft had near total dominance over every desktop computer on the planet.
The only argument than can come close to that is Apple has a large share of phone app revenue because people using Android don’t pay as much.
Microsoft never attempted dominance of the kind Apple asserts. You look at threads like this: https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/issues/445
This doesn't just affect iOS users - if I want to use Briar to communicate, it's just impossible to involve anyone who has an Apple device. They don't need a total monopoly for this to be anti-competitive. They've made it so that if you have 10 devices and you want some feature like AirDrop, it's impossible for that feature to function unless Apple wrote it, because 4 of the devices are Apple devices and Apple monopolizes all network code to those devices.
Lol. Clearly, the EU should force Apple to allow apps to keep TCP sockets open in their background!!!
You people are delusional.
Platform restrictions aside, maybe I’m missing something but requiring a permanent open socket seems like an awfully brittle design. There’s a lot of network conditions which phones are highly prone to that’d make apps with that requirement barely functional.
Dr Dos was a perfect example of MS trying to squash competitors. MS didn't tolerate ANYONE competing with them.
That's small potentates compared to what MS was doing. Windows was actively updated to break other browsers and then IE was actively leveraged to kill off competing browsers and server side web technology. For years the only thing that survived their onslaught was OSS.
And that's on the tech side of things, business wise they would do even less ethical things. If Apple bought Briar specifically to kill it because it ran on Android then you might get a taste of what MS was getting up to.
I HATE these arguments. Peter Thiel talked about this in one of his lectures. He said: when you're a small company you define your market as small as possible in order to compete; when youre a large company, you define your market as large as possible in order to avoid antitrust. To illustrate the example, if you're the only grocery chain in California, you'd argue that "the united states has many grocery chains and we're just one of them!" thats true, but it doesnt mean that you arent acting monopolistically from within California. To bring this analogy back to Apple, we have to look at areas of competition: the area of competition that Apple meaningfully engages in is the apple app store. This would be the equivalent of california. Is any app in the apple app store prevented from meaningfully competing with Apple? Yes! 1. higher prices via app store fees 2. not allowed access to the same apis (e.g. files syncing in the background or no native messaging capabilities) 3. browser + messaging restrictions (e.g. cant link to a website which has any way of spending money). The reason I look at the "app store" as a place of competition is because apple is allowing competition in the space. If Apple removed the app store, or ONLY had Apple apps in the app store, then they would be acting perfectly fine IMO. But they allow this competition because it allows their platform to succeed, but they behave monopolistically wrt that competition to gain the upper hand over time.
Interesting, I haven't quite seen that perspective before. The reasoning of Apple creating a market is the first argument that actually makes sense to me. And I actually agree with the spirit of it. I definitely lean very heavily on Apple's valid security issues, but the fees and deliberate blocking of things that have absolutely no security concerns are a problem.
That's a level of stability many mobile and web developers dream of today ;)
Web APIs are forever. What's unstable are the dreadful frameworks built on top of it that people seem to think are essential.
Since people don’t seem to understand Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior, I recommend you start with Groklaw[0] and decide if you want to dive any deeper. Microsoft was akin to US Steel or Standard Oil. We really haven’t seen anything like it since.
0 - http://groklawstatic.ibiblio.org/staticpages/index.php%3fpag...
Isn’t it slightly different since Apple designs and sells the hardware with the OS, whereas Microsoft was manioulating entirely separate hardware companies and not designing their own hardware product (until recently)
Whether Safari is this way deliberately or by chance, is something to be found on a court. But Apple's behavior here isn't different from the Microsoft one with IE.
Microsoft's market share was well over 90% in the 90s. The iPhone's market share is 60%. Very different market dynamics.
It was a lot easier to see how Microsoft was being mean-spirited for consumers versus Apple. I'd argue that Apple's policies are consumer agnostic, and the only people really up in arms about Apple are developers and some of its partners.
Also the US is no longer in a position to be punching it's own companies, given the onslaught of Chinese companies that are seeking to undercut in even auto manufacturing now.
>Microsoft's market share was well over 90% in the 90s. The iPhone's market share is 60%. Very different market dynamics.
Couldn't be more wrong. It's not even remotely comparable.
Yes Microsoft had a 90% OS market share but it was an open OS running on open HW platform wich had many players, so users had the freedom to install whatever non-Microsoft SW and HW they wanted on it and SW developers could develop software for it without needing Microsoft's permission for sales or distribution on their OS, or giving them a 30% cut of their profits (other than buying a MS Visual C++ license maybe).
While Apple might have an "only" 60% market share now (though it's currently 87% amongst US teens today[1] so it's only a matter of time till it reaches 90s' Microsoft levels of monopoly amongst US gen-pop) but it's a closed OS running on closed HW with attestation, so costumers and SW developers have absolutely no choice but to run only Apple approved content on them. Vastly more restrictive than what Microsoft of the 90's could even dream of.
>It was a lot easier to see how Microsoft was being mean-spirited for consumers versus Apple.
How? Just like Apple, Microsoft was only being mean spirited to SW and HW vendors and competitors, not to consumers.
[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/apple-stock-teens-iphone-e5...
There was no reasonable alternative to Windows for any consumer. There's a reason that the 90% market share number was for Windows.
Also, you could have developed whatever you wanted, but made an active choice to try to extinguish those applications with OEMs, ISPs, and content providers to squeeze out Netscape. It's truly lost on people today how Bill Gates was an absolute killer back in the day.
The consumer experience for iPhone users is much better than that of Windows users back in the day. People were scared of Windows.>There was no reasonable alternative to Windows for any consumer.
Didn't stop you from selling your SW for the Windows platform without paying Microsoft a dime or Microsoft having any way to stop you. Look at WinRar or the thousands of other small companies who made a living selling SW for Windows without paying Microsoft a cent.
>The consumer experience for iPhone users is much better than that of Windows users back in the day.
UX is subjective and debatable. And there's a difference between one having poor UX, and one being "mean spirited towards users".
>The only way to sell software was in boxes and intermediaries took 80% of developers money.
But did Microsoft take their money like Apple does today?
The internet and shareware distributions was also a thing back then, where you get the SW for free from anywhere, and send a payment to the developer and received an activation key over the phone/post.
I think you're taking all of the decisions that led up to the success of the iPhone for granted. For instance, if this path is such a no-brainer, why doesn't Microsoft install a walled garden of their own? It's not due to the beneficence of their hearts.
Something that is a surefire success in one platform is not necessarily a surefire success in another. Which is why saying in hindsight "this is monopolistic behavior!" is such a silly thing to do.
Well, for one MS Visual Studio used to cost a fortune. Sure you could use whatever other -- also expensive -- DE or compiler but the end result and the ergonomics weren't as good.
If I'm not mistaken you also had to pay to redistribute or link to system libraries so yeah, you had to pay a pretty penny to play.
Microsoft would charge you up-front for things like dev tools (Visual Studio), documentation (MSDN), server software (MS SQL, Windows Server), etc. Yeah, you could get alternatives, but it wasn't until the very end of the 90s that you started to see FOSS really take off in a way that would be appropriate for an enterprise-style environment.
App stores take a cut of revenue, while Microsoft would get its revenue before your project shipped.
If there was no reasonable alternative then why was it 90% and not 100%?
Consumers weren’t Microsoft Windows customers for the most part - OEMs were. OEMs were not free to install any other operating system. Well they were. But they still had to pay for a Windows license even on computers shipped without Windows.
And this article is about the EU where iOS is less than 40% and Apple Music is less than 10%
>OEMs were not free to install any other operating system.
All the PCs I bought in 90's Europe came without Windows OS preinstalled. What you're talking about it the deals between Microsoft and the likes of Dell/HP/Compaq, etc, but nobody forced you to buy those brands as there were plenty of other local assembled alternatives without OS in the shops back then.
You mean like no one forces you to buy iPhones because there are plenty of Android devices?
Androids can't run the SW developed for iOS same how X86 PCs built at home can run the SW developed for X86 PCs sold by Dell/Compaq nor can you sell you iOS SW you developed for Apple HW outside of Apple's SW garden.
Please stop making up arguments that are not in good faith.
I said that Microsoft’s customers were OEMs and that MS was found to be a monopoly because they forced OEMs to pay for Windows licenses for every computer shipped whether or not the computer was running Windows. This was part of the lawsuit.
The reply was that there were other computers sold in Europe by the non big brands that did not include Windows.
You could not in fact run the “same” Windows software if you were not running Windows
Apple has a 20 to 30% market share in Europe. All these comparisons apply to the us only ( where, interestingly enough, Apple is not getting fined it would seem ).
This is an interesting point.
The EU always seems to be the one doing the work with this sort of regulation. Maybe the evil solution is just: avoid anti-competitive behavior in the EU.
The actual thing that Microsoft got in trouble for was technical and legal restrictions Microsoft put in place, especially on OEM/hardware manufacturers, to prevent prebundling of the paid Netscape product.
This is very similar to how Google lost against Epic on it's "open" Android, while Apple (mostly) won https://www.theverge.com/24003500/epic-v-google-loss-apple-w...
Interestingly enough - the one point Apple lost on in the Epic case is exactly what they're being fined for by the EU.
This is the right answer.
Apple was nearly dead. Microsoft literally gave them a big investment to keep them alive [1] , in part to avoid monopoly-related issues [2].
Microsoft was doing everything in its power to kill the only other serious browser at the time, Netscape, and it basically had "won" the desktop and server market. It's pretty astounding that Apple was ever able to do as well as it did in the server, laptop, and desktop market.
1. https://www.neowin.net/news/a-quick-look-back-at-when-micros... 2. https://www.engadget.com/2014-05-20-what-ever-became-of-micr...
This is not true. The “big investment” was $250 million dollars after Apple had already secured a multi billion dollar loan.
Apple then turned around and used $100 million to buy PowerComputings Mac assets. Apple continued to lose millions after that. The investment did not “save” Apple
It was $250M, a public acknowledgment of continued Office for Mac development, and the announcement of Internet Explorer for Mac gave investors, business buyers, and developers confidence in Apple. Because if Microsoft, the biggest tech company at that time, was bullish on Apple the rest of the industry could have faith in them too.
The $250M was largely symbolic, everyone knew that.
The person I replied to in fact did not know that
There's a big geo-political component now at play, at least when it comes to Europe (I live in Europe). Meaning that the Europeans can try and upset the big American corporations up to a point (almost 2 billion euros as in this case), but not any further, because at the end of it all the security of the continent depends on American hegemony, on American guns and ultimately on American money.
From that point of view the situation back in the '90s was a lot more fluid, as at some point there were even talks of an Europe that would have extended "from Lisbon to Vladivostok" (so leaving the Americans out of it altogether).
> the security of the continent depends on American hegemony, on American guns and ultimately on American money.
And the security of the American chip industry depends on ASML machines, and American airline passengers depend on EU made airplanes. What's your point? Every post-WW2 economy is dependent on the other economies nowadays. There's no fully independent economy that can survive on its own anymore.
US (and other including EU) companies get fined because they break EU laws, it's not done out of spite. If they dont wanna get fined they should stop breaking the laws. Simple.
The US doesn’t need Airbus. Europe needs American tech.
Yeah, what would we do without Windows, Facebook and Instagram stealing our personal info and pushing us ads? /s
Most of Europe’s communication can be severed by turning off WhatsApp servers. That’s just one product out of thousands that Europeans take for granted every day. Operating systems, maps, productivity, communications, cloud, entertainment, the list is never ending.
Europe is extremely dependent on American tech. An indisputable fact.
My company is highly intertwined with WA and if they killed it off in the EU, we'd just switch to Signal/Telegram/the millions of other secure messaging services out there ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
Disrupted, sure. Severed? You do know that we still have a functioning SMS network, right?
Also, personally, I don't even use WhatsApp since I can communicate with my family using Signal. It's so easy that even my grandma uses it.
>Most European communication can be severed by turning off WhatsApp servers.
Oh no, what am I gonna do then?! Oh wait, I can just contact people by GSM voice or SMS, or use Signal or Threema the secure Swiss messanging service.
FYI, the US communication can be disrupted too because they're using Nokia-Siemens 5G stations since the US has no local players in this space anymore.
Let's stop being childish, ok? This isn't a CoD lobby for edgy 8 yearolds.
US without European precision engineering, machinery, etc. - might be tough for a while.
I didn't say it was "out of spite", to the contrary, I said that the measures should have been (and could have been, given a different geo-political context) a lot harsher, such as trying to breaking up Apple's operations in Europe and more.
That type of action is off the table for the foreseeable future, and the same goes for the other big US tech companies that are operating in Europe in defiance of the spirit of EU laws, such as Alphabet and Meta (anything related to Musk is a special case because of politics-related concerns).
That security arrangement is currently dissolving, so those ideas around not upsetting the US are fading.
We'll have to wait and see, for the moment I think it's mere posturing coming from some European leaders.
To begin with, the European nuclear deterrent when it comes to keeping Russian on their toes is a joke compared to what the American have as part of their arsenal.
There is no European nuclear deterrent. The non-proliferation treaties bar any further countries from developing one. It would be a huge upheaval for even Germany or Italy, let alone the EU itself, to develop their own nuclear deterrent. (Not to mention politically impossible within Germany itself!)
The UK has a quasi-independent deterrent (we developed our own and then agreed to abandon it and buy the US option instead), but is not part of the EU any more.
The only true independent EU nuclear deterrent is France.
An under-appreciated aspect of the NATO/EU defence situation is that the US does not actually want the EU, or any of its constituent countries such as the former Axis powers, to become too capable. Or develop a local manufacturing capability that outsells the US one. The US actually prefers a weakish Europe defended by US troops to one strong enough not to need them and even to contemplate removing them.
The NPT could be exited. Germany is under a tougher bind with the 2+4 treaty, though.
Ultimately, Europe is capable of doing its own thing - US or not.
The US signaled pretty clearly that it cannot be relied upon so Europe will need to react (incl. on nuclear and other deterrence).
It might be hard to imagine in a world where open source mostly won, but in the 90s Microsoft essentially had a de facto monopoly over the computer industry.
Mac OS was a thing, but it was different and expensive enough that it was not really a viable alternative to Windows 95 for most people. Solaris and HPUX existed, but were not accessible to home users. The alternative platforms of the late 80s (Atari, Amiga, Acorn) had pretty much died out by the mid 90s. Linux was very much a thing, but without a viable web browser it was really tricky to use on a day to day basis... and the only really viable web browser was Internet Explorer, so you ended up dual booting to Windows. If you (I) wanted to use a computer, that's how it was.
In short, the kind of monopoly that Apple has with its App Stores affects some consumers in some ways, but the kind of monopoly that Microsoft had in the 90s affected almost every computer user in almost every way.
Apple is a “monopoly” in the EU with less than 40% market share?
How do you believe Apple's overall market share is related to the (pre-DMA) monopolistic nature of their App Stores? I can't see a clear connection between the two things.
A monopoly can be so many things that the question needs to be "is it causing harm?"
For example, a trademark or a copyright or a patent is a monopoly on the use of that IP, and those are considered "good" by the governments and courts.
In my (IANAL) opinion, I think the important question for a mobile app store needs to be: do users and developers have a meaningful choice between iOS, Android, and just a website?
I really don't know the answer to that, though I expect the market share plays a part in it — if iOS was 10% or 90%, then developers surely would not have any meaningful choice.
There was a lawyer and a judge in the Epic case that in fact did rule that Apple wasn’t a monopoly…
And now they've had a different court which, assuming antitrust and monopoly are the same concept, says they are.
As I'm not a lawyer, my understanding of their arguments is going to be strictly worse than ChatGPT's, and I know it.
Well the EU is not exactly known for well thought out jurisprudence or legislation when it comes to tech.
Could you give any examples? I'd say GDPR was an incredibly well-thought-out bit of legislation
You mean all 99 sections and 11 chapters?
And all we got was cookie banners
And it didn’t affect the big guys. It just made compliance harder for the little guys
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33561222
It’s a regulatory nightmare for smaller companies.
Apple’s Ad Tracking Transparency did more to affect privacy - according to companies like Facebook that admitted on earnings calls that they projected billions in losses based on iOS users opting out
All of the AI regulations are just going to make companies say - forget it in the EU. How much longer did open AI take to come to the EU as opposed to the US?
So Apples overall market share in the EU is less than 40%…
At the end of the 90s, the internet was also not everywhere. Many people had 56k modems, smartphones did not exist ( and mobile phones weren’t exactly ubiquitous) so there was no way out, ie your apps were tied to your operating system, which meant windows to most people.
The difference is that Microsoft was targeting general purpose computing with policy-based restrictions, and Apple is selling mobile phones that are not general purpose computing devices and later on a service ecosystem to go with it.
We could re-qualify mobile phones as general purpose devices (which technically they could be but in reality they are not), that would make the parallels much closer, and we could also have the service ecosystem made non-optional (it still is optional) to make it a bundled requirement, that would make the parallels even closer.
Other than that, the landscape and context have drastically changed, especially when it comes to presence, attention, personal attachment and the abuse of all of that (addition, mass media consumption, personal information that gets stolen or mined, attacks on devices that have a real world impact). So even if we were to make it just a browser war it wouldn't really be the same.
It's a shame Palm, RIM, Microsoft and Nokia are no longer playing the same game, it would have been interesting to see what their take on the market would be. Considering all of their hardware and software had the exact same model (release it as an appliance, all software and in some cases all traffic goes through them), it would have allowed more people to have some perspective.
Huh? Apple chips are not Turing-complete? Or are they "not general purpose computing devices" because Apple would like us to believe so?
Many Logitech peripherals have Turing-complete chips (ARM processors), but no one is claiming that my mouse is a general purpose computing devices.
Apple is selling a system made of a combination of hardware they make and the software running on top of it.
A GPC device should be able to develop and compile programs directly on device without any external dependency. That's what you get with Windows, Mac or Linux.
HTML+CSS is considered Turing complete [0], but we wouldn't call that a complete GPC environment.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2497146/is-css-turing-co...
It is silly but we arbitrarily classify computers as general purpose or not based on the market segment they go after. Phones, video game consoles, e-readers, TV sticks… and also cars and some refrigerators could run user provided code, but the general expectation is that it is OK to locked them down for whatever reason.
Only Microsoft tried to follow Apple in lockstep with Windows Phone 7: no USB mass storage, homegrown browser engine with no alternative, and no exposed filesystem.
Blackberry phones were sort of similar, but as enterprise-first devices they always had a reputation of being mostly a work email device, not personal. They still had filesystem access and microSD expandability though.
Blackberry really blew it (hard). They could've been more pervasive and successful than iPhones and Android but they never put in the effort to make their phones easier for developers to use. Everything was so obtuse and difficult and they were far too late to the game in regards to, well, everything.
They didn't have a "glass slab" style phone until literally every other phone had been like that for years and years. They were also late to the game with cameras, IMUs, and other hardware features that we've all come to take for granted.
My guess: They listened too much to their enterprise customers. Enterprise customers have very, very specific needs that are essentially the opposite of "general purpose" that would translate into useful features for anyone else.
They didn't even try to innovate!
RIM's problem was hubris. The top brass listened to their "gut" instead of taking a sober analysis of the market. Their approach to devices in 2008 was basically the same as in 2001. They assumed BES was an unassailable moat. They also assumed carriers would never budge on data plans and I can only assume they had never heard of WiFi.
What the market was saying in 2008 was it didn't actually give a shit about BES, didn't give a shit about BBM, software keyboards were fine if they didn't suck, and real browsers on phones were important.
Instead of really listening to the market RIM just kept making the same devices as before. The iPhone and even early Android phones blew the doors off BlackBerries. By the time RIM decided to join the rest of the world it was too late. They were releasing devices in 2010 that couldn't compete with iPhones and Androids from 2008. The BlackBerries were up against the iPhone 4 by 2010, they were a joke in comparison.
I went from a BlackBerry Pearl to the first iPhone. Even in the admittedly early state of iOS 1.0 it was vastly superior to the Pearl. It wasn't even funny how much better of a device it was. Every iPhone after that just increased that gap over whatever RIM was selling.
I would argue this is 100% false. They are general-purpose computing devices! The only reason why people think they're not is because they're locked down.
Apple got away with it so Google did the same. Yet there's really no reason why these devices should be locked down the way they are. It should be much easier to take control of our phones than it currently is and I'd argue that with the recent EU decisions regarding app stores we're about to get just a tiny little taste of what these general-purpose computers in our pockets could be.
Apple makes both the hardware and software, it’s their device, hence they can do almost anything they want.
Microsoft at the time provided only software and put legal and technical restrictions on PC manufacturer’s ability to uninstall Internet Explorer.
Somehow, that is repeated so often as if it was the truth. Making both HW and SW makes it even worse, not better.
It makes it less ambiguous. There is no suggestion when you enter the Apple ecosystem that there is any way to use 3rd party hardware or software.
There is one supplier for the hardware: Apple. One supplier for the OS: Apple. And for phones, tablets, TVs and watches, only one supplier for software: Apple's official store.
Apple hardware like a gaming console. You buy an Xbox because you want/need an Xbox. You don't start fantasising about installing Arch on it and playing indie games from itch.io. You're perfectly happy getting what's available in the official store.
lol if this were true why is Apple one of the most valuable companies on earth?
There are regulations in many industries that prevent companies doing almost anything they want.
IMO there are good reasons for some regulation of platforms.
Despite all the talk Microsoft wasn't broken in pieces and never paid a significant penalty. The loudness of the congressmen was to compensate for that.
Now the Overton window has moved and people no longer believe a company can be broken up.
I recall reading that Microsoft basically had government oversight personnel on site. I also recall learning somewhere that the thing that basically saved MS from having the book thrown at them was that George W Bush was elected in 2000, and the DOJ switched hands - and didn't care much about pushing the issue.
[1]https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/federal-antitrust-ov...
Why do people always assume there's only two ways to deal with a monopoly? All you ever hear about in terms of dealing with monopolies are:
1) Break them up 2) Fine them
From history we know that #1 is really friggin hard to get right (see: AT&T). We also know that #2 is usually ineffective and can harm consumers that are still locked into the monopoly.
There's other options!
Monopolists are always difficult to break up and there's always going to be negative consequences. Whole towns could go bankrupt as a result of ending a company! Thousands of workers could suddenly be jobless. The list of possible negative outcomes goes on and on.It behooves society to look past these short-term consequences though and look towards the future. The longer a monopoly goes on the more it stifles the future. It may feel like you're cutting off an arm when you end a really big, powerful company but it's more like cutting off a tree branch. More and better branches will grow in its place and younger, nearby trees will now have access to more sunlight.
Unpopular opinion (here on VC-funded HN): The way capitalism is supposed to work is that large, old companies are meant to be overtaken by newer, more nimble ones. It shouldn't be so easy for large companies to acquire smaller ones. That's a big reason why tech monopolies persist! SO many of Microsoft's "staple" products wouldn't be part of their portfolio today if it weren't for acquisitions.
Microsoft had a monopoly with the ambition to capture the whole market: “A microcomputer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software.”
It is impossible for Apple to do that, it is against their DNA. They only sell limited product categories, all their hardware products would fit on a desk in their Apple Store if the merchandize wouldn't be so spaced apart. Their products are targeting a higher price point and if a product spirals to a race to the bottom (mp3 players, wifi routers) they leave the market. They dislike to partner with other companies. They are targeting consumers/prosumers, not business market. This all means there will always be very large gaps in the market which Apple won't cater too.
Just wait until they've integrated their entire supply chain.
Apple is nowhere near as bad as Microsoft. Microsoft was so bad that Bill Gates had to eradicate deceases from the surface of the planet to redeem himself.
Apple still has great customer experience and they still sell their products to willing customers and their damage is essentially to their competitors and the users might be losing out on even better service or can be overpaying.
Microsoft was considered the Devils incarnation. Awful lot of people still hold grunge towards Microsoft due to the suff they had to face because of the Microsoft's abuse of their market position. People who are really really angry with Apple are not that many, it's mostly people who get sherlocked or were denied the ability to publish their idea on the AppStore. Also, there a few who think they could make more money if Apple didn't take a cut or didn't stop them from collecting data.
If Microsoft was Saddam, Apple would have been Lee Kuan Yew - Singapore's dictator.
SaaS has given corparations so much more power over users and devs, that anything good ol' M$ did (remember that abbreviation?) could not be nearly as bad as a dominating company could do today.
Who's being 'soft' on Apple?
In the past few years Apple's faced significant regulatory and legal action over it's App Store in the US, South Korea, Japan, United Kingtom, Australia, and the EU.
The EU has just forced Apple to open up to alternative App Stores and enforce browser ballots when you first open Safari.
I hope the EU follows through, Apple's "compliance" is actually obstructing.
From Felix Richter: "The information technology and communication services sectors, i.e. most things tech, were responsible for more than 70 percent of the S&P 500’s total return of 26.3 percent last year. Excluding companies from these two sectors, the index would have returned just 7.6 percent in 2023. The “Magnificent Seven” – Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Meta, Tesla and Alphabet – accounted for roughly 60 percent of the index’s total return, illustrating how top heavy last year's rally has been."
In short, nobody wants to be perceived as the one that cooked the golden goose.
And in 2022 tech was a big reason why the S&P 500 tanked, dropping 30% when the rest of the market dropped 20%.
Live by the sword die by the sword.
> what are the differences between Microsoft back then and Apple now in terms of why the regulators are so "soft" against an actor that is overplaying it's hand for consumers?
The monetary proportion that big-tech contributes to US GDP. It would be silly to assume the US would ever kneecap it's most profitabile and rising industry. After killing its manufacturing industry, tech and finance is all ti has.
Manufacturing's share of US real GDP has remained relatively stable over time: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2017/april/us-manu...
i.e. the quantities of goods produced is growing about as fast as the economy. The reason manufacturing is dropping as a percentage of nominal GDP is that inflation for manufactured goods has been lower than for other goods.
Apologies for this, but it's "for who" not "for whom" in your case since it's the subject of the sentence.
Through the late 90s and yearly 2000s I needed to purchase an expensive and slow emulator plus a Windows license just to do banking, taxes or accurately open some Office files. That's a monopoly.
If you buy an Android phone, you can use Uber, Instagram, Spotify, banking, maps, accurately render web pages, taxes, etc. There's nothing essential to modern mobile that's iOS only.
MS had ≈ 95% global market share back then, Apple has ≈ 30% of mobile market share now.
You may not like Apple's attitudes, but claiming they have a monopoly on mobile is comical.
In the US at least, I tend to think that was the last gasp of an old anti-trust regime that had basically run out of gas by then. The 80's saw a conservative revolution that extinguished a lot of worker and consumer protections.
https://www.promarket.org/2019/09/05/how-robert-bork-fathere...
MS was a bigger chunk of the market, and it was, well, a lot more _blatant_. And already had a history of dubious behaviour by the late 90s (eg see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code). As someone else mentioned, MS in the 90s to early noughties was probably the most egregious case of tech misbehaviour ever (though some of Intel's stuff also wasn't great), so you're kind of grading on a curve here.
Generally speaking, what changed was the value in the tech sector skyrocketing (enabling political lobbying as well as propaganda - the latter of which Apple is extremely good at, just look at the amount of HN comments mindlessly repeating their propaganda about how opening their platform is such a massive security problem. Meanwhile the App Store has been rife with spam and fake apps for the past decade; you literally can't easily find government apps here because shady app companies buy adspace on the searches and put up apps with similar sounding names but with aggressive monetization) combined with ~20 years of US regulators just not really enforcing much in the way of antitrust cases whilst the EU was still on the boat of "maybe we should ask nicely" since that usually works for local enforcement.
Things are finally changing on that end (far moreso in the EU because big tech basically keeps pretending it's just the backyard rather than to be taken seriously and it's pissing off regulators), but it's still somewhat of an oddly prescient fact that Silicon Valley/US tech companies broadly more or less "invent" old corporate crimes that take a decade to get enforced because regulators don't get that the difference between a physical form of fraud and a digital form of fraud isn't really that big.
EU is catching on and has been passing landmark regulations specifically to attack this crap, while the FTC is doing what it can in spite of the GOP having been pulling it's teeth for the past 20 years.
Probably a host of reasons. MS had 90%+ of the OS marketshare (Excel had ~90% of the spreadsheet market). I think it's hard for people to understand just how dominant MS was at the time - closest might be peak Google with search. Bill G while likable today because of his philanthropy, was really painted then as a ruthless businessman. MS ignored DC and politics for the most part. At the time, the west coast was even more of a different world than what was going on in DC.
All the companies today learned from MS. They have armies of lobbyists and court politicians. They are all ruthless business people, but come across as more human and cuddly. They have become key parts of the US economy. I think there's also some fear that if they do go after big tech they could inadvertently make things worse for constituents. Remember, the only thing a politician thinks about is getting re-elected.
Could be wrong but Microsoft also had a policy back then to not spend much on lobbying before the trial. They now spend quite a bit. In the US, Apple spent a measly ~6 million a year before bumping it up to 9 a year in 2023. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1043061/lobbying-expense...
By contrast, microsoft has consistently spent 9-10 million a year. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1043105/lobbying-expense...
Could it be a coincidence? Obviously. But it does seem like if you play the game, you’re less likely to get burned. Of course, that’s a very US centric approach and it makes sense that the EU is the one bringing on these challenges.
Standard “my opinions are my own” post script.
FWIW Microsoft software and generic hardware of the time were way more open for anyone.
Competing with MS was hard or even impossible, but they didn't try to control what you code or run on your machine, didn't try to interfere with software vendors' revenue streams and didn't even go after piracy the way they could.
Those was right calls that made Windows so ubiquitous.
All the sibling comments trying to compare exactly how alike or different MS vs Apple behavior is, like a compare and contrast high school essay, are missing the mark. Some are very insightful and bring up information I wasn't aware of. They aren't low value comments but I just don't understand why you would think it's even possible to compare two of the largest, most profitable companies (depending on the time we're talking about) 30 years apart. I mean, it's informative to discuss for sure but the markets, tech, laws and public opinion have all changed since then. Apple doesn't have to be as bad, in the same way, with the same motives as Microsoft, for it to be bad, anti-competitive behavior. The markets are both bigger, and more segmented as well.
I don't think we're going come up with a universal measuring stick to apply here though I'm sure some tech reporting outlets will try.
Legislation has always been extremely slow when it concerns major corporations. Partly because there isn’t a great public incentive to really care about Apple vs Spotify, which means there is less political focus and in term less allocated resources. But mostly because EU law is complicated and large companies have a gazillion lawyers to poke at its holes.
Involvement in the political process, i.e. donations to candidates/campaigns and general lobbying spend.
Different times. The corporate propaganda machine that resulted from the Powell Memo hadn't yet infected the majority of minds (even with Reagan's heavy push) so there were still more people willing to hold companies accountable.