Spotify give itself a massive competitive advantage over other legitimate music services by stealing the music they didn't have the rights to stream.
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Apple Says New EU Interoperability Rules 'Bad for Our Products and Our Users'
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Can you offer a link so I can read up on this?
It's sad that so many non-rich Americans support Silicon Valley billionare oligarchs over ordinary people, and also voted for Trump. Trump will use their tax dollars to give tax cuts and corporate welfare to Silicon Valley oligarchs as well as other oligarchs. DOGE is canceling a lot of important things in order to use the money allocated on those things to give contracts to greedy corporations, and tax cuts for corporations and the ultra-rich. If those oligarch-supporting non-rich Americans get financially destroyed in the future as a result of Trump's actions, they deserve it.
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Related to requiring inventions be given to competitors due to lowered ROI...
It’s safe to share this story since it was over 30 years ago. I was an architect on OS/2 2.0 at IBM. As part of my portfolio, I worked with the hardware people at the IBM PC Company. IBM aimed to push OS/2 as an operating system for all PCs, not just IBM PCs. The Personal Software Products division mandated that OS/2 couldn’t support new proprietary IBM hardware features to avoid appearing to other manufacturers that IBM favored itself. OS/2 would happily add features for Dell or Compaq, but not for PC Company unless they became open standards. I saw two projects killed on the drawing board exactly because the PC Company determined there would be no appreciable ROI in developing a differentiating feature that had to be given to competitors in order to get the software support the feature required.
Wait and see, in about 4 and a half years things will be a lot less different than everyone is worried about now.
As someone who has been directly impacted by DOGE in a very real way, the idea that because I think the DMA is a huge overreach I’m somehow a Trump supporter is offensive.
In fact, the DMA has a lot in common with DOGE - the government picking which companies are impacted or not, making sure it doesn’t apply to favorite companies; doing things like arbitrarily declaring that even though the law says you have to have X number of users for it to apply, and iPad doesn’t have x number of users, it applies to the iPad anyway; declaring that integrated business models and closed ecosystems are prohibited because they don’t agree with the ideology of the ruling regime - that’s DOGE 101.
Sure, if you focus on that on the so-called "favoritism" and twist yourself into a pretzel to see the similarities for the purpose of holding water for Apple, I guess you could say that there is a whole lot in common between DOGE and the DMA. You could also point to the fact that an egg yolk is orange and say that it shares similarities with a graprefruit.
As opposed to giant corporations picking solely based on their own interests?
To some extent yes, right.
Yes, IBM was trying to make OS/2 the norm (bring along other companies to help growth), but the problem is many other companies were trying to do the same. (that was the era of the Wild West of PC) IBM pulled the plug after the PC Jr was a failure. My family members were on the PC team from the late 70s to the near End; when they sold the division to Lenovo. He was also one of the PC creators of a line of personal computers for IBM.
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That’s the point. They cannot do so fairly, in comparison with Apple, within the iOS ecosystem. Plenty choose to do so, but automatically at an unfair disadvantage.
They can create their own ecosystem and compete with iOS. That would result in loads of competition. But they don’t want the hard work of doing that.
Companies look out for their interests’ and their customers’ interests. That’s how the free market works. If customers don’t like the options offered by Apple, they will be punished and either need to change their policies to meet customers’ preferences or accept lower revenue.
Garmin or Pebble doesn’t have a right to have their devices work at all with iPhone, let alone have access to all the features Apple has created for free - any more than Apple has the right to force car companies to accept CarPlay 2.0 or I have the right to force Walmart to sell my product in their stores.
The barrier for government intervention ought to be extremely high - and “we could build the product for Android, but we want access to Apple’s devices and features without paying Apple, when we can’t even be bothered to make a great product for Android that doesn’t have restrictions” doesn’t meet that bar.
Again, no one was doing anything to fix Bluetooth pairing until Apple decided the status quo wasn’t good enough. So they spent a lot of time and money to fix it. And their reward for fixing problems like that from now on in the EU is “everyone else gets it for free”.
How can any company compete with Apple with things like seamless integration with the OS when Apple don’t give access to the software
So that means that Apple always have the upper hand in that regard
Hence the issue
To be fair, Apple has recently provided access to the AirPods style pairing window; it was announced last year, at WWDC I think. I think Apple realizes to some degree that their ecosystem is better with lots of companies making different things for it.
Of course this was Apple's decision to make.
Meet AccessorySetupKit - WWDC24 - Videos - Apple Developer
Elevate your accessory setup experience with AccessorySetupKit. Display a beautiful pairing dialog with an image of your Bluetooth or...
So your answer is if a company doesn’t like it they should go & build their own mobile?
A bit of a silly argument that.
Again you can’t have it both ways by owing the operating system & then releasing things like headphones & watches for said device
Then deliberately give your products special software features to work better with said device that your competitors won’t get
Playlist algorithms are an intrinsic feature of music streaming services.
Anyone is free to improve such intrinsic features on their own products and leverage them to differentiate them from the competition. The same is true for other connectivity features. And yes, they can use their expertise and experience gained in other, related products to do so.
- Developing a better algorithm than Spotify 👉 no problem
- Having better audio compression or operate better server farms than Spotify 👉 no problem
- Making headphones with better Bluetooth firmware or wireless chip for improved connectivity 👉 no problem
- Selling such wireless chips or licensing the technology to other headphone makers 👉 no problem
- Keeping the technology to themselves, to differentiate their own headphones from the competition 👉 no problem
- Using your entrenched and dominant market position in smartphones
- Leveraging your entrenched and dominant position on another market/product (mobile OS) to gain an unfair advantage on the markets for headphones, watches, streaming services 👉 only that is being restricted
They can not - unless they create their own core platform service
.
Which is neither feasible nor desirable from a consumer standpoint.
(one or two other platforms, yes, may. Everyone else that wants to compete with Apple? Definitely not.
That’s merely theoretical a possibility for most companies that have to rely on the incumbent platforms.
Thankfully, the Digital Markets Acts - like forms of regulating competition is concerned with the real world.
The world would be a much worse place if everyone had to reinvent the wheel.
Or create all of their input goods and distribution platforms themselves.
How can you seamlessly connect to an Apple device if Apple don’t give you access to the software.
It fundamentally doesn’t matter how good a company’s product is if they don’t have access to that software you won’t be able to do it & Apple know that.
So that in turn give them the advantage over other companies that sell headphones & watches for example
Again you can’t have it both ways
You can’t be owner of the OS
Then sell products that compete against other companies to then deliberately give your shelf the advantage by having seamless access to the device you own.
Because nobody can compete with that & in turn gives Apple the advantage over of products
Like we’ve seen when Adobe moved to subscription-only pricing?
That did exactly nothing.
Well, we pretty much have reached a compromise then, haven’t we?
If you look at when the DMA entered into force, how long the commission took to conduct their proceedings and issue specifications decisions and what deadline Apple has been given for compliance…
It is about three years that it took takes, isn’t it? 😉
We can't expect market ideology and consumer action to solve for any of this given how bought, paid for and fully corrupted the "free" market concepts now are.
This is one of many key problems with suggestions of "just switch to Android"
This is one of many key problems with suggestions of "just switch to Android"
So if I want to release an excellent pair of headphones, or im an app dev, or a keyboard maker, and I want to make them work with iOS as well as an Apple product does, you’re suggesting I need to write an OS, develop and sell a phone and create my own eco system to do it? That’s crazy talk. It’s also ridiculous. As a consumer I don’t want that. Apple doesn’t want that. God knows why you want that.
Everything would be so much better if we would just worry about consumer protections and let companies navigate around that as they need to.
Company business structures are fully human created entities that are not deities that should be yielded to above individual interests and benefits.
All of this should be in service of what's best for consumers
(directly better, not in some nebulous "but this might make a company maybe make something better eventually for consumers, maybe" way)
Company business structures are fully human created entities that are not deities that should be yielded to above individual interests and benefits.
All of this should be in service of what's best for consumers
(directly better, not in some nebulous "but this might make a company maybe make something better eventually for consumers, maybe" way)