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Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

What would have been a better outcome? Continuing to make customers pay for the feature?

Buying the company? If so, what about the competing companies that offer this functionality? Apple obviously felt it would be easier/cheaper to build than buy.

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Buying the company (or a competitor) would have been fair: it would have felt like “the market has spoken” and a winner was picked. Building anew after playing it cool feels very “Pirates of Silicon Valley”.

This said, single-platform feature apps like this are always at risk from this sort of thing.

And before Steve Jobs came back, Apple would buy third-party utilities to incorporate into MacOS (System 7.5 WindowShade, MenuClock, Hierarchical Apple Menu were all third-party acquisitions)

Apple still buys companies all the time. Perhaps not always well-known app developers, but certainly a lot of them. (Shazam is one from recent memory, as was Siri.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

Note that nearly all of these occurred after Steve Jobs’ return and continued apace after his death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

This makes me believe that if Apple is building their own rather than buying, perhaps there’s not a whole lot of innovation that the app developer created that wasn’t trivially replaceable.

They still acquire when they need the talent, but the utilities I listed were absolutely trivial (printing the time in the menu bar?) and Apple could have easily just replicated them

Whenever someone mentions how much better/different it was under Steve Jobs reign it's always a sign that the comment is 100% wrong.

Especially since all of the Apple senior leadership team were still there making the same decisions as when Jobs was CEO.

I think the commenter is actually stating that Apple was better on this front in the era when Steve Jobs wasn't able kind. As in, the Gil Amelio and the like era.

Can't seem to be able to edit but "able kind" was meant as "around".

They could have bought the company if necessary. Frankly it just wasn't worth buying. That is the market speaking. The market said it was better to develop the thing in house.

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