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Comment by vixen99 | Hacker News Reader

That's a bit savage. Did Apple look for unfair advantages or did they design products that people loved and bought in preference to others? Ditto many other industries. Traders (capitalists) should indeed look for monopolies if they don't want a race to the bottom but that monopoly can be based on unique value to the customer if crony capitalism isn't involved although sadly it's all too prevalent. Markets are dynamic. Conditions change. People's needs and desires change. The monopoly of today will eventually dissolve and at best become one of many equivalent options, tomorrow. That's one of the messages of zero to one, Peter Thiel's recent book.

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Apple, pretty much singlehandedly, invented an entire category of computing (the smartphone), and reaped the market rewards for it. They were ready, saw the opportunity, had the business chops to make the most of it, and got fabulously rich in the process. An example of the system working does not mean the system always works. There's been a lot of dirt done over the years.

That's not to say I'm anti-capitalist by any means. I think it's a great economic engine and a tool for great good. That we can never turn our backs on, lest it devour us. ;)

Not quite smartphone per se, but the new big touchscreen phone form.

Yes, Apple didn't invent the smart phone by a long shot. But they were smart enough to know how to make the smart phone consumer friendly, which is where a lot of tech companies fail. Look at PocketPC which proceeded iPhone, not friendly at all. Even my new Android phone is still pretty clunky UI wise compared to the iPhone it replaced.

It should be noted, the LG Prada predates the original iPhone by about 6 months, with largely the same design (to the degree that LG sued Apple alleging that the design was copied). Apple managed to capture the market, however, whereas LG didn't.

I guess I'd characterize it like Henry Ford inventing the Model T. He was not the first man to make an automobile by any means, but he invented the auto industry. I've used pre iPhone smartphones, and there is a reason they're all dead now and Apple is rich beyond imagination.

You don't have to do it first if everybody before you couldn't close the deal.

I have some comments and thoughts, sorry for the long read!

> Did Apple look for unfair advantages or did they design products that people loved and bought in preference to others?

They made cool products, but they're the most valuable company in the world, at least in part, thanks to the unfair advantages too. The most blatant of them being the $14.5 billion in unpaid taxes in Ireland. And this is Ireland! Imagine if they paid the taxes proportionally in each of the countries where their operate, or in the US at least.

> Traders (capitalists) should indeed look for monopolies if they don't want a race to the bottom but that monopoly can be based on unique value to the customer if crony capitalism isn't involved although sadly it's all too prevalent.

Never have I heard of an industry that benefited from having a monopoly by a for-profit company more than not. Precisely because they are for-profit. These companies work to increase revenue; as much as they market otherwise, the "value to the customer" is but a means to grow this revenue. If they can grow this revenue without providing as much "value to the customer", or in fact, if they can increase revenue by providing less "value to the customer", they will.

And this is not me vilifying them, it's sadly the way things work. Otherwise, we'd have super cool stuff but companies would go out of business. Take every example of a monopoly though, and since they don't need to provide as much value, they all end up decreasing it.

> Markets are dynamic. Conditions change. People's needs and desires change. The monopoly of today will eventually dissolve and at best become one of many equivalent options, tomorrow.

Except when they don't. I think you're thinking of this only from the tech lens, right after a period of rapid growth and lots of marketing, and he staple child for this claim is probably Microsoft, and how Apple went from the underdog to the beamoth. I have two comments on this;

1. What really broke Microsoft's monopoly? I don't think it was new companies innovating, or people's demands changing. It was a change in the system and ideology. Tech went from being your standard capitalist industry to an interesting beast thanks to the emergence of the Free Software Movement, which shares many ideologies with socialism/marxism.

2. Would Standard Oil or the Bell Telephone Company have "eventually dissolved"? The problem with this system is that it's easier for the rich to get richer; if you have a monopoly and the conditions are changing, easier for you to buy out competition or R&D into the next thing than for any other company. Even now that Standard Oil and the Bell Telephone Company have been artificially split the companies that came out of them are still the biggest ones around; not some new ones, though the times have changed a lot.

> That's one of the messages of zero to one, Peter Thiel's recent book.

Haven't read the book, but Peter Thiel is a businessman after all. I'd take his views more as opinions, since he's not really a full-time economist researcher.

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