Lol, talking about monopolistic closed systems iOS and Apple aren’t good examples 😂
Android comes in many flavors and isn’t monopolistic in any way.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple, Google Face UK Antitrust Probe Into Mobile Ecosystem Power
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Android comes in many flavors and isn’t monopolistic in any way.
Microsoft
Microsoft loses up to $200 on each Xbox console sold
Microsoft loses up to $200 on each Xbox console it sells.
www.eurogamer.net
Nintendo
Nintendo's Wii U games console will be sold at a loss
Nintendo says its forthcoming Wii U games console will be sold at a loss, reversing its previous strategy.
www.bbc.com
Sony
Sony’s $499 PS5 is no longer selling at a loss
The PS5 won’t be costly like the PS3.
www.theverge.com
Is there was no iOS then Android would have a complete monopoly. We need more OSes to return competition to the market.
Were Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Symbian, FireOS etc not valid examples?
Consumers balked. Developers shunned.
That’s the long and short of it in my opinion.
I loved both WP and BlackBerry. Microsoft went so far as to partner with devs to bring apps over but most didn’t see it as worth their while. Not sure what regulation would have fixed that issue.
That’s why you need regulations to stop developers from picking winners in operating systems by refusing to support some platforms.
They make good on that by selling games. Together they are profitable 😊Microsoft
Microsoft loses up to $200 on each Xbox console sold
Microsoft loses up to $200 on each Xbox console it sells.
Nintendo
Nintendo's Wii U games console will be sold at a loss
Nintendo says its forthcoming Wii U games console will be sold at a loss, reversing its previous strategy.
Sony
Sony’s $499 PS5 is no longer selling at a loss
The PS5 won’t be costly like the PS3.
Cross-subsidisation, also an anti-competitive business practice (using the profits from one business to subsidise selling another product at a loss).
Again, in a lot of cases it's not that they don't want to support the platform, but they literally can't afford to. Is the UK going to subsidize every developer to hire an engineering team to work on every platform? If Windows phone has 50,000 users in the UK, are we really going to make the two-person Tapbots team develop their Mastadon client for it when it'll get something like 20 downloads - all to support a third or fourth platform that the market has already overwhelmingly shown customers don't actually want?
Yes. Don’t get into app development if you don’t accept the responsibility of doing your bit to maintain a competitive mobile operating system environment.
Thank you for clarifying that. Still both were ahead and got the chance to dominate the market, but lost the opportunity.
Not really. While it may have been "working fine" in the early years when there was more evenly balanced competition among several players like Symbian, BlackBerry OS, Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, etc., today's market is different and dominated by just two major players (iOS and Android). Hence the antitrust/competition law issues.
This is a reason why regulators are now (finally!) starting to address these issues in the mobile market. Unfortunately, the legal and regulatory process can be very slow.
I think we now know why tech companies are being cozy with current POTUS: if forced to comply to law like this from other countries, POTUS can force tariffs and trade restriction as retaliation for attacking American companies.
Unfortunately he doesn’t know that EU and other European countries are ready to retaliate back hard if he attacks their laws with tariffs.
He’s basically asking for full on trade war at this point that he won’t win.
Wow. That might be the boldest take I've ever seen on MacRumors, and I've been here since 2007. I'll let it speak for itself.
The eu certainly is picking its battles. How would it do without apple, google and facebook?
I think you and I are basically in heated agreement that "[t]his is capitalism, with all its benefits and detriments," and that regulatory threats like the UK ones described in the OP do little more than block a sizeable portion of the populace from being able to buy the kinds of products they value from firms that are willing to sell those products to them.
I just don't see how the business-history facts (Microsoft "told developers to start from scratch," etc.) you list suggest that it would somehow be impossible for these massive tech companies—Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook/Meta, at least—to mount a robust effort in the near future to provide our resident complainers with exactly the products they claim they want (indeed, the products that those folks assert they are entitled to be able to buy).
WarmWinterHat declares that he has some kind of basic human right to be offered a smartphone on which he can "blow away the OS to bare hardware" without any interference from the phone manufacturer? Well, great: Microsoft and Amazon and Meta and even Google are ideally positioned, based on their market capitalization, their demonstrable access to manufacturing capability, and their experience with these kinds of products to launch a smartphone—and a related smartwatch, tablet, laptop, desktop, smart speaker, Bluetooth headphones, virtual-reality goggles, etc.—that matches those specs precisely.
Sure, those big firms made various mistakes, as you describe, in their previous attempts to offer phone products... but so what? That's all water under the bridge now, and all these companies remain extraordinarily wealthy. Now that they know that the appropriate product that will sell like hotcakes in the market is one that gives WarmWinterHat his precious unfettered right to "blow away the OS to bare hardware," they have everything they need to bring Apple and its disgusting walled garden, which no consumer actually wants (and which we need governments to protect us from), down in flames. When everyone abandons worthless iPhones for "blow away the OS" phones—which are, obviously, indisputably superior—Apple will be defenseless, and it will either adapt to the new market expectations or perish.
The point—on which I think you and I agree—is that if consumers actually want what Apple critics here claim, no governmental intervention is required at all; everything that makes Apple and its products so horrendously objectionable can be addressed by one or more of their enormous competitors, who can easily introduce self-evidently superior products and thereby destroy the Cupertino company through the ordinary operation of the free market.
The only other possibility I can think of is that the people demanding altered Apple technology are little more than overgrown infants pitching tantrums that Apple is not offering products (1) that address their bizarre little personal fetishes but (2) that there is near-zero actual demand for in the marketplace. If this is not the simple story about capitalism that you suggest (and I agree), it would then have to be the case that, having failed to convince nearly anyone to join them in desiring such products, these folks are now demanding that governments use their monopoly on force to coerce Apple into changing their products into things their customers hate but that scratch these folks' little personal itches.
In short, the alternative account to "[t]his is capitalism, with all its benefits and detriments" is powerful national and supra-national governments should put a not-entirely-metaphorical gun to Apple's corporate head and force them to produce the precise toys that a few little boys holler that they're entitled to, even though no one else wants them.
And we know that all of that can't be what's actually going on.
Government force is literally a not entirely metaphorical gun, so yeah I do agree that government intervention should be minimal at best. I also think pure capitalism doesn’t work well without some balancing regulation, because then it just ends up the same as communism, except we call them corporations instead of governments, boards instead of politburos, executives instead of government titles. In the end it’s still just the oligarchs that own everything, and make major decisions via small committee with little to no public recourse.
But to move back to slightly less political, I think the problem with the phone/device you describe is simply a matter of mass market appeal. These devices exist today. There are companies that provide them. They’re just highly niche. Linux is about the best anyone can come up with
I agree. I just picked Xiaomi because they still exist. They should have done more. Fines are not the answer to fix this.
You have misinterpreted what I have said. So don’t start putting me down when you didn’t understand what I was saying please.
I never said they didn’t. I said they should look into barriers and what it would take to have other players in the market.
Breaking them up is one solution, but others operating systems can survive (Xiaomi as an example). So what would it take to bring more in, short of just fining them. Maybe breaking them up is a part of an initial strategy to bring in new players. That what the investigation review is about.
Your comparison is fine. It’s just not what I was talking about.
Oh, certainly. I'm not arguing that regulation is always worthless or malignant (to the contrary, in many industries at many times it's vital to society), or even that antitrust regulation is always bad.
But in a situation like this, in which every single thing that is allegedly objectionable about Apple's products could be cured if one of the several other behemoth technology companies simply designed and marketed competing products that consumers liked more, the case for government intervention in the market strikes me as flatly ludicrous.
Government stringently regulating the actions of an electric utility because no other firm could possibly afford to build an entirely new (and redundant) electricity-distribution system to compete with the present one makes all kinds of sense. But government demands that Apple fundamentally re-engineer its products because "I WANNA IPHONE I CAN JAILBREAK!" [flings dirty diaper, screams, pounds high chair with fists] is deranged. More to the point, it can only leave a huge number of consumers vastly worse off than we were before.
I am glad that rare sanity is here on MR. There are plenty of OS around. Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it does not exist. But those OS are joining the competition precisely because of the network effects.
But that is on a technical level, by CMA standard you could have a different UI on top of Android and call it another OS.
No they're not. You invest 40 years of a startup then sell it to Apple and presto have a brilliant team transform Apple and go, "What about Be Inc? Whose going to help Be Inc?"
Government isn't going to help develop the Frameworks, choice of programming language(s), kernel, filesystem, supported filetypes, feature sets, etc., just because you think they should.
Go hire 50k software developers. They won't be able to develop an OS because 99.9% of them aren't Computer Science graduates with MS/PhD in areas like Network transports, Kernel development, application space, etc, to compiler, linker, experts, etc.
LLVM, MS, Intel, GCC probably has 500 contributors world wide combined, and of those the vast majority of commits are within a very select group of individuals.
If the EU was interested in Operating Systems for the EU they should have started heavy investment back in the early 90s just like Linux started.
Today, Linux is a joke on the desktop but king in the server space. Why? Desktop is much harder to develop than the server space.
You need to hire experts in the HIG, and experts in encryption, network design, etc., all with deep RFC/ISO standards knowledge.
Most of those folks work at Apple, Microsoft, Govt Labs, major universities who know the daunting task you want with more Operating System choices.
It's a fallacy to believe more than 2 major platforms can compete in the desktop. We discovered that at NeXT.
Playstation and Xbox own the gaming platforms, with dozens of failed challengers left in their wakes. Common factor was large, deep pockets to persist and eventually outlast the competition, then investing heavily into gaming companies and then buying them out.
Microsoft with all of its Desktop knowledge if you recall ripped off the Mac and MacOS. When tasked with the embedded space they always outsourced to their 3rd party OEM partners like Bsquare which knowing them first hand were trash.
Motorola at one time was king with their 68000 architecture, deep pockets in R&D, software development and Assembly language design. They bailed on any chance at a desktop consumer before the Mac arrived. Once the Mac arrived it was going to be a two person race. Has been ever since.
SGI Ultrix, SunOS, HP Unix, DEC Unix, System V, BSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, were a mix of desktop lipstick, over a Server OS platform.
Only NeXT survived being the foundation upon which today Apple thrives.
And this, right here, is why the EU and the UK are in the mess they're in.
