One must remember, though, if it wasn’t for the Apple IIe, then the Mac, then iTunes, then the iPod, then the iPhone, Apple wouldn’t have customers that Google would want access to bad enough to spend $20B from evil Google. People imagine in their heads that Apple became a company last week. When, magically, a circular building appeared in Cupertino, a stock appeared on the market already valued at over 2 trillion, and products appeared, no manufacturing, shipping, software development and delivery, just POP into billions of hands with no effort whatsoever from the company that JUST appeared last week.
Every “anti-trust” effort basically centers around the fact that Apple, more than any other company, have worked hard to focus on and grow a user base that’s comfortable with making digital purchases AND that have the currency to purchase billions of dollars of digital purchases per year. Just going down the list of complaints highlights companies/organizations that have been near as good as Apple at building an affluent customer base, have not been ABLE to invest their money in building an affluent base and would, instead, like to pay no money to capitalize on what Apple’s spent countless dollars on “lifting a finger” doing since 1976.
