Yup!
For instance Braina, MyCroft, or Leon. Amazon Alexa is actually also available for Windows and any other Android device.
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Apple Facing Imminent U.S. Antitrust Lawsuit
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For instance Braina, MyCroft, or Leon. Amazon Alexa is actually also available for Windows and any other Android device.
I just meant that they have already removed the rule preventing cloud streaming game apps.
But yes I agree.
To Bender's country with Blackjack, and hookers! Actually I think they forgot the Blackjack.
I agree. Apple has pulled a lot of crap, some of which the DOJ probably should investigate them for. But iMessage is not one.
If the government wants to help, they can do what China did (can’t believe I'm saying this) and make the telecoms come up with modern messaging as part of the 5G spec and support it whether they can gouge their users for it or not.
As we may recall, the US telecoms "experimented" with RCS for a few years, "experimenting" with ways to make money from it, and when the "experiment" failed just pretended there wasn't a problem with SMS.
My point is that Apple’s supposed monopoly in mobile is no guarantee of future success in that or anything else. Steven Sinofsky made a similar point a few weeks ago. https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/215-building-under-regulation.
By the time the DOJ went after Microsoft for using its dominant position in OSes to try to make its browser the standard, it didn’t really matter. Browsers were a commodity by then, and Chrome eventually became dominant (nothing to do with the DOJs actions). AI appears to be the next big thing. Apple was clearly caught off guard by OpenAI and generative AI in general. Who will be the dominant tech company in 2034? No one knows.
Not sure that's right. Microsoft destroyed any possible market for shrink-wrapped, commercially-viable, money-making browsers. With no path to making money, Netscrape was sold to AOL and their lousy bloated version 4 just got worse.
Then Microsoft, facing no real competition, effectively stopped browser development efforts. IE6 became... the end... for Windows, at least until the next Windows version potentially might bring the next version of IE.
Eventually, Firefox (originally named Phoenix) came out of nowhere with a better browser. Microsoft was forced to go back and start developing its browser again. In that world Steve Jobs created Safari out of KHTML, KHTML morphed into WebKit, WebKit was adopted by Google, and out came Chrome. And then Chrome effectively destroyed Windows.
And it's worth noting - Firefox, Chrome, etc were all funded with Google search/ad revenue, not a more traditional software licensing model. Because, well... Microsoft destroyed the commercial viability of selling browsers.
In 1998 browsers had a larger impact than mobile phones, which were strictly for talking and basic texting. The early attempts at data were laughable (remember WAP?). The DOJ was worried about how we would access “the Internet” (the “next big thing” in the late 1990s) that they couldn’t see that by 2010 mobile devices would become dominant, and Microsoft had no way of leveraging its Windows “monopoly” to dominate mobile.
There is virtually no market for shrink-wrapped software at all anymore. The mobile era changed that with the app model (little upfront cost with in-app spending or subscriptions). And as you point out, Google pioneered a different business model altogether.
In 2000, if someone told you that Microsoft would buy Nokia’s phone business in 2014 and use it to promote Windows Phone, you might have thought that Microsoft would be cementing its Windows monopoly and using it to dominate another market. In reality it was a desperation move by both companies to stay relevant in mobile.
The other thing is there is a world where Apple opening up the watch to work on Android could benefit them,
Yes and do people consider it could actualy help Apple, if you could use the Apple Watch with Android maybe it would spur even more Apple Watch sales, selfishly I just want smartwatches to work completely by themselves, free the Apple and Galaxy Watch.
Yes and the complexity of such concepts, just read Wikipedia, then imagine what it would be like to study and become a lawyer specializing in such laws, it is so damn complex, schools of thought, changing politics,
Yes and I don't know why two things could happen at once, Apple could open up things and still offer a secure platform, both things could be true at the same time, anyway, here is the opening to the Lawsuit:
In 2010, a top Apple executive emailed Apple’s then-CEO about an ad for the new Kindle e-reader. The ad began with a woman who was using her iPhone to buy and read books on the Kindle app. She then switches to an Android smartphone and continues to read her books using the same Kindle app. The executive wrote to Jobs: one “message that can’t be missed is that it is easy to switch from iPhone to Android. Not fun to watch.” Jobs was clear in his response: Apple would “force” developers to use its payment system to lock in both developers and users on its platform. Over many years, Apple has repeatedly responded to competitive threats like this one by making it harder or more expensive for its users and developers to leave than by making it more attractive for them to stay. For many years, Apple has built a dominant iPhone platform and ecosystem that has driven the company’s astronomical valuation. At the same time, it has long understood that disruptive technologies and innovative apps, products, and services threatened that dominance by making users less reliant on the iPhone or making it easier to switch to a non-Apple smartphone. Rather than respond to competitive threats by offering lower smartphone prices to consumers or better monetization for developers, Apple would meet competitive threats by imposing a series of shapeshifting rules and restrictions in its App Store guidelines and developer agreements that would allow Apple to extract higher fees, thwart innovation, offer a less secure or degraded user experience, and throttle competitive alternatives. It has deployed this playbook across many technologies, products, and services, including super apps, text messaging, smartwatches, and digital wallets, among many others.
Maybe not shrink-wrapped exactly, but there's still plenty of market for paid software even if it's some app store, something like Steam, or subscriptions.
Ignoring enterprise for a second, Microsoft still makes a lot of money selling 365 Home/Personal subscriptions to people for home use on Mac despite the fact that LibreOffice and iWork are both $0.
There is zero market for paid browsers. Hasn't been one since Microsoft decided to offer IE for free (after originally throwing IE1 into the extra cost Plus! for Win95 for a few months), integrate it with Windows, and made that deal with Steve Jobs that saw IE bundled for free on Mac.
I thiiiiink Netscrape's original business model was supposed to be 'distribute the software for freeish online, require a paid commercial use licence for any business use, and sell some boxed copies too' The day Microsoft decided to throw in a 'good enough' (which later became 'better' when Netscrape 4 was a buggy bloated POS) browser with Windows for free, then paid Steve Jobs $150 million to have it thrown in on Macs too, that business model went down the drain. Hard to convince an IT manager to pay $X/machine for a browser when you already got a good enough one for free.
Yes, the same way that they wanted Microsoft to support Java in the late-1990s. The appeal of 'middleware' (as they called it back then) is obvious - if desirable end-user application X runs on middleware Y, and middleware Y is available for machine/OS A, B, and C, then A, B and C have a lot less market power.
Of course, that just means that Y has the market power instead, but what has typically happened is that any such middleware is so mediocre that it never gets to that point.
It's funny how Steven Sinofsky and Steve Jobs basically all agree about the undesirability of middleware (as does anyone who has used any software written for non-native APIs on anything), but... to a regulator desperate for competition in an industry where network effects tend to push towards standardization, opposition to middleware looks like trying to lock in your competitive position.
It would be cool if you could use the MacOS on any computer, who knows, in such a crazy world in which Apple allowed such a thing, maybe more people would sign up for their services, or you know, they could offer an Iphone for $299, similar to the Nothing Phone 2a, but you see they still want to juice every dollar they can out of their inflated hardware prices, the bean counters have not given the signal yet, once they determine that Apple Services is more important than the Apple Iphone, you watch, you will see cheaper Iphones, they are already talking about putting advertising on the Apple TV, hmm, will the marketing "Apple is the leader in privacy" start to quiet down, once the world reaches peak smartphone ownership, to maximize your share price, you need to find that next juggernaut, if you don't think Apple will turn on their consumers, and start selling more of your data, then you believe in fairy tales and pixie dust.
Lurking in the background of the late 1990s was the idea that the browser, perhaps enhanced with Java (ewww) would become a platform that would threaten Microsoft's monopoly on PC desktop software. And if Netscrape and Java is the new platform, then you can run that... on a lot of things that aren't Windows, e.g. some of those network computer things Sun was playing with.
The unfortunate reality is that that nightmare became true a bit over a decade later with the launch of Chrome. No one writes new "software" for desktop anymore. Everything is web-based. And even when you see "oh, vendor X has a desktop app for Windows, Mac and Linux, that's wonderful", ten minutes later, you realize it's just Electron trash around web stuff.
And it's worth noting - Electron-type garbage, or Chrome, runs just as poorly on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chromebook. Certainly doesn't run less bad on Windows. Which is a problem for Microsoft, or would be if they hadn't switched to being an enterprise subscription company.
Anybody who thinks the ubiquitous use of web technologies is a good thing should get themselves a G4. One interesting side effect of the timing of the Intel transition is that all this web/Chrome/etc stuff basically doesn't exist on PPC. And it's remarkable just how fast a PPC machine running period-correct software that doesn't embed three Chromium engines is...
And I wish Steve Jobs was around and could have somehow killed Electron the way he killed Flash, but I guess the Mac is too open to do that.
Agree with you there, there is actually a possibility that this Justice department lawsuit could help Apple in the long run, I think many here can't possibly imagine a world in which creative destruction worked to produce technology that would better serve them, a world in which Apple is destroyed by another company that would ultimately, improve the lives of said Apple devotees, I think some here miss a basic guiding principle of Apple, they don't give a cra* about their consumers, they have been smart enough over the years to realize there was a dearth of quality technology in this space, they filled it by actually caring about delivering quality devices, that was smart and technology needed a hungry upstart to shake things up, but has Apple become the staid and lazy and less innovative company that they initally fought against, time will tell.
Not really on 'any computer' - just on PPC boxes made by other folks... at least some of which really used Apple-designed system boards.
Oh, come on. The DOJ doesn’t take action against a company to benefit that company. Don’t think they are acting in the best interest of consumers, either. Usually the main beneficiaries are companies with inferior products.
I never wrote that it was aim of the DOJ to benefit Apple, just that in a counterintuitive way, it could be the result.
Both IBM and Microsoft came out of antitrust issues making plenty of money, but also... making all that money from 'legacy' uncool businesses.
I doubt it. Micromanagement by government bureaucracies rarely benefits anyone. It’s a distraction. There could be a monetary penalty. More importantly, I don’t think a more “open” iOS benefits Apple. If it did, Apple would have done it. Obviously Apple decided it was in its interest to make iPod, and later iPhone and iPad work with Windows (back when a computer was required as a “digital hub”). If it were in Apple’s interest to make the Apple Watch work with Android, they would do it.
As John Gruber points out, Apple Pay obscures the credit number from the merchant, thus making it more difficult for them to track a customer’s buying habits. A big card-issuing bank bypassing Apple Pay probably would not.
The DOJ liked to point out that Apple may be blocking “innovative” solutions from competitors. I’ve already pointed out that Apple did the world a favor by essentially killing off Flash by refusing to support it on iOS. That forced developers to write native apps, not just for Apple, but ultimately Android, which benefitted all consumers.
Frankly, they're bureaucratic lunatics who simply aren't smart enough to regulating something like this.
Particularly in the 1990s, it would have been very difficult to write a universal OS capable of running the same apps on both PPC and x86. Even Microsoft couldn’t do it (they had a version of Windows NT for PPC in development but it didn’t run x86 apps). The point is that opening up macOS to clone makers didn’t benefit Apple. It almost bankrupted them. One of the first things Steve Jobs did after he returned as CEO was to kill off the clones.