[MW Forums]

Apple's success is making the company more like Microsoft than Microsoft is, according to Mike Elgan. more

[zensunni]

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Sticker shock

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This is a bad sign, a sign that Apple is becoming another Microsoft. I'm sorry to see it happen, and I surely didn't expect it. The past few years Apple's been about making things easy for you using their iApps, and I have no idea how they can convince themselves that forcing you to pay for ringtones rather than allowing you to put your own from your own library is anything other than monopolostic bravado. Sad sad sad day. For once, my fingers are crossed for a class action lawsuit.

[Iruka]

Sorry - I am confused. Why does the rant of one journalist make it "official"?
Class action suit? - knee jerk reaction of the USA. Just use consumer power and don't buy if you don't like. The people who benefit from that rubbish are the lawyers.
I

[ShinySteelRobot2]

Jeez, if this guy hates Apple iPods so much then just buy a freakin Zune and stop whining. (Hey genius, there are other competitors to the iPod out there.)
I use Windows all day every day at work. If this guy says that iTunes is the slowest, clunkiest, most unintuitive application on his system, then what other Windows apps does he run? Notepad.exe? C'mon, ALMOST ALL the other Windows apps people commonly use are clunkier and more unintuitive than iTunes. Maybe he just needs something like Clippy the Office assistant to be added to iTunes to help him figure out how to use iTunes. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif
And in case he hasn't noticed,
WORLD'S LARGEST SOFTWARE COMPANY/MONOPOLY (Microsoft) is NOT EQUAL to WORLD'S MOST POPULAR MAKER IN THE MP3 SEGMENT OF THE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY (Apple). The next article from this hack will probably tell us that mauve is the new loud.
That's just a start. The whole article's riddled with BS and non sequiturs.

[RavyNWolf]

can we say "apples to oranges?"

[booga]

Please... when Apple has the power to charge retailers for each MP3 player sold-- WHETHER OR NOT THEY'RE IPODS-- then we can discuss them even approaching Microsoft's monopoly powers. Apple isn't even in the same order of magnitude yet.

[mike3k]

There is one big difference: Apple products don't suck.

[sdf]

It is becoming increasingly difficult to treat Macworld.com seriously, and stories like this are the major cause.
I know MacWorld's writers didn't write this, but maybe it's time to start respecting your readers and stop republishing other writers' unintelligent, non-insightful, vapid trash.

[leicaman]

One of my favorite lines really applies here.
"With all those straw men you just set up, aren't you afraid they might gang up on you?"
Many of the points have a half-truth quality about them. But some of his claims are pure bunk. Such as "Bill Gates never had that power..." blah blah blah. Nonsense. He used to dictate to 90+ percent of the computer world that they can only sell computers with Windows. Yellow Dog has been selling Macs with Linux for years with not a single lawsuit from Apple.
As for the copycat argument, that's nonsense too. Apple never copied anything anyone else did and did it worse than the original. They always improved it and made it better. No so with Microsoft.
He's right, Microsoft was often unfairly criticized for working in the market they were placed in. But so is Apple. And setting up a bunch of straw men, and then knocking them down in a pseudo-rant doesn't make what he says factual. By any stretch of the imagination.
Yes, Apple is being tough, and a hard-nosed competitor. But I think the writer's apologia for Microsoft soft-pedeles their evils in equal measure to the overstating of Apple's evils. Parrallels? Yes. Equivalence? No freaking way. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif

[SPOOF]

I must say...your attack on iTunes, iTunes store DRM files, and the iPod is completely unfounded, especially since you mention it as being so different from everything else.
Everything else is either mp3, in which case you can't buy any major music to begin with, or it is Windows DRM and requires Windows Media Player and Windows DRM. iPod is the different choice, even if it is the most popular choice. If you'd rather get locked into Windows DRM only portables with less quality and no player on the Macintosh, you're welcome to. That isn't Apple's fault that the "competition" just doesn't cut it...the "competition" just doesn't care.
Go ahead, choose another locked in format instead of this one. Either way, it is market choice, not a forced choice of a monopoly. It isn't fun, it isn't pretty, it isn't nice...but if you want to play with the record companies, you had to...at least until the latest releases sans-DRM...and those WILL work on any player that supports the industry standard MPEG 4 Audio format.
Yes, Apple has pulled parts of the OS from shareware authors and open source, it has collaborated with massive amounts of groups and people. Most of the time this hasn't been a bad thing though. One thing Apple is slowly learning to do though, which is the one thing MS really did right, is to partner with everybody under the sun.

[ShinySteelRobot2]

I recommend that you also post your replies over at Computerworld (this article is reprinted from their site). Here's the url:
http://www.computerw...mp;pageNumber=1

[sdf]

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I recommend that you also post your replies over at Computerworld (this article is reprinted from their site). Here's the url:
http://www.computerw...mp;pageNumber=1

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Why? Computerworld is not my problem. I know they're idiots. MacWorld.com republishing their articles without tagging them now, that's the problem. And the solution to that is posting here, not there.

[sternlight]

That's all very well, and brilliantly written, but monopolistic behavior is against putlic policy.
To add to your image of Apple today, consider the original 1984 commercial. It is now the "Apple faithful" who blindly follow their merciless, inhuman leader-image over the edge of a cliff. It is now Steve Jobs who appears on the giant screen (at Apple events) in front of a blindly adulating, hypnotized audience. Given Apple's behavior over recent years, it can be argued that if it hasn't already happened, Apple is in serious danger of becoming what they hate.
And while we're waxing wroth (poor Roth) over Apple for the moment, stepping back it is clear that Apple has consistently introduced overpriced, underpowered products since the beginning, only to soon follow with a more purpose-suitable revision involving buying new product. Putting the best face possible on this consistent corporate behavior, one might argue that Apple is trying to get a beat on the market by introducing product a year before components were cheap enough to provide the capability users needed. Although this had the advantage of getting Apple sales, and the consumer visibility for advanced technology it had (to give Apple the benefit of the doubt) the unintended consequence of exploiting the consumer (others have used more rude language).
The examples are overwhelming Inadequate RAM capacity; inadequate mass storage; the hyping of hardware design features years before Apple operating systems could take advantage of them, by which time one or two newer generations of better, cheaper hardware had come out. The list goes on.
There is now a sufficient body of data to make the judgment even on the part of technically unsophisticated regular buyers. And as the word gets out, exacerbated by sophisticated users' reaction to, for example, jobs' recent blunder with the user base on discontinuing a model after most have owned it for about two months, and cutting prices by a third for another highly promoted model, there results enough publicity for even relatively recent considerers of Apple products to have second thoughts.

[smax013]

Not that I am necessarily going to dispute much of what is said in the article, but when comparing the iPod and iTunes/iTunes Store to Windoze and Internet Explorer, the author forgot to mention one tiny little detail. In the case of Windoze and Internet Explorer, there was an existing product called Netscape that was out there and basically by far the dominate player in the browser world. Micro$oft linked in Internet Explorer to Windoze and basically used that link to kill Netscapes advantage. In the case of the iPod and iTunes/iTunes Store, there was nothing really out there in that market space to compete with for online music sales...not to mention that at the time the iTunes Store was released that the iPod was not anywhere as much the dominate MP3 player as it is now. The whole MP3 market and online music service was in its infancy. The point is that the iPod and iTunes Store got to be the dominate player in that market because Apple committed to that market before anyone else really did and they did it well. In many regards, Apple built that market with their products that fed each other. Apple did not really leverage one product to help the other product beat out other products...the built the iTunes Store to fill a void that existing (other than people stealing music and putting it on peer-to-peer networks) products did not really fill and to "feed" their iPod line.
Now, I won't disagree that Apple does have a monopoly in the MP3 market to some degree. But, it is not the same as Micro$oft's monopoly in Windoze and how they used that monopoly with Internet Explorer. Frankly, if you want to compare, then talk about Windoze and Micro$oft Office. Micro$oft used Windoze to kind of "leverage" Word and Excel back in the Windoze 3.1 days to become dominate in the word processor and spreadsheet markets. But, it was because no one else was willing to dive into those markets for Windoze...123 and WordPerfect stayed in the safety of the DOS world. So, to help "boost" and "feed" Windoze, Micro$oft had Word and Excel...and in the process, they because the dominate word processor and spreadsheet. That is MUCH more like the iPod and iTunes/iTunes Store dynamic. And I have never seen anyone complain about Micro$oft's monopoly in those markets...that is because it was a monopoly that was more fairly gotten than their monopoly in the browser world.
In addition, I will note that market shares are also quite different. The iPod only controls about 70% or so of the market if I recall correctly, while Windoze is still something like 90% or of the OS market.
As to bullying people, that I cannot dispute too much. However, I am not going to get to upset about Apple bullying media companies like record labels and TV networks. After all, why should I loose sleep when Apple is bullying the people who want to control how/when/where I watch the content that I legally paid for (ala DCMA crap and broadcast flags, etc) and sue their own customers (ala rampant RIAA lawsuits of people when they really have not done the true due diligance to prove that person actually stole music and still send what amounts to not much more than an extortion letter). And I will note that to some degree those people who get bullied by Apple are to some degree to blame for why the author cannot take his iTunes purchased content to another player (but Apple is part of the problem there...they could license the Fair Play copy protection technology to others, but don't...and to some degree I don't blame them...why should Apple have to let others feed at their trough when it was Apple that was willing to stick their neck out in this market before it took off and be a reason why this market is where it is today?).