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Comment by dusklight | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure this is a good thing.

As far as I can see, Apple is if anything even more tyrannical and monopolistic than Microsoft, the main difference being that Apple is sexier. Apple wants the computer to become like a household appliance, closed to outside modification.

Looking at how they've run iTunes, the restrictive iPhone SDK, etc ... M$ wanted to control all your software but they at least gave you some choice on hardware. If Apple becomes the new monopoly we won't even have any say on that.

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That is a bit worrying, but at least it will be a monopoly they've earned one user at a time, like Google, rather than an existing monopoly they took over from the previous owner, like Microsoft.

That will tend to limit their misdeeds, because to do that a company has to have a different type of employee. If Google wanted to start being evil, they'd face an internal revolt. And Apple too, to some extent.

OS's have some network externalities, so "one user at a time" isn't entirely accurate. There's a tipping point in there some where.

Have you read "In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 years of High Tech Marketing Disasters" ? He makes a convincing case that a lot of the MS monopoly comes not from brilliant products or evil genius, but by hitching a ride on a more open platform, and having had less disasters than the competition.

I'm not sure I agree with him 100%, because once they got that toehold, they sure exploited it to crush everyone else. I don't have many doubts that Jobs has some crushing tendencies himself - exhibit #1 is the look and feel lawsuit.

Oops: I downmodded you by mistake when I meant to downmod the lame South Park metaphor. Sorry!

Did you guys ever watch that South Park episode where one of the grade-school girls starts to grow tits? Suddenly all of the boys start thinking "she's so smart!" and "she's so funny!" and wanting to hang out with her, and they honestly have no idea that there is any connection between their new attitudes and her new tits.

There is no question in my mind that Macs are beautiful. The latest gadgets like the iPods and iPhones are real works of art.

Sometimes I wonder if Apple doesn't get cut a bit too much slack just because they are "cool". Just because someone is beautiful and smiling at you doesn't necessarily mean they do not have malicious intent. And especially it seems a lot of times, we are just so eager to believe in any credible opponent to M$ that we are willing to overlook any warning signs. I wonder if the peasants that supported the French and Russian revolutions felt the same way?

From what I've seen of the Apple community, they seem to have a fairly easy time swallowing the not-so-savory things Apple does, with reasoning like "they need to maintain the user experience" or "they're a corporation, tuey need to make money for their shareholders, expecting better would be naive" or "screw that, who cares, there's nothing we can do, look at my sexy Mac". Probably the last reason is the most honest, since the former is to some extent BS, and the second is a sort of "well done genius, you've spotted one of the major problems in Western society" moment.

I haven't seen anything of the culture inside Apple that would suggest its employees to be any less dismissive of Apple's forays into "asshole corporation" territory. Especially considering that they're largely recruited from exactly this pool of Apple users.

"Apple wants the computer to become like a household appliance, closed to outside modification:" i think you're putting the cart before the horse, there.

i'm not sure where i read it, might have been in one of pg's essays. the author pointed out that, in the early days of the car, you had to be a car expert to own and operate one. they would break down all the time, your only hope was to know what to do when that happened. eventually cars were refined to the point where any and everybody can have one.

computers are on that same trajectory.

At least they contribute to open source, are more UNIX-like and seem more open in general, speaking of Internet standards.

Well, make sure all your code, docs and media are portable. So, remind me, what exactly is the problem?

I'd say the main difference is that MS has a monopoly and Apple only has a very small part of the market. Thus MS is held to a higher standard.

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