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Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

Apple is predatory on a level that 1990s Microsoft could not have dreamed of, which is all enabled by Windows being an open platform while iOS is locked down with strict technical measures.

Microsoft would make competition harder by bundling "good enough" versions of competing software into Windows, with business deals restricting pre-installs of competing operating systems (if you pre-install Windows on 100% of machines, you'll get a massively better deal than when installing on it on 95%), and (arguably) by making interoperability harder by not having stable documented interfaces and having the interfaces change with new releases every few years.

That was bad. But Apple... Apple hasn't been just making competing harder, but outright impossible. It's one thing to compete against a free pre-installed product. It's another thing to try to compete when the platform owner straight out forbids you from shipping a product that competes with them, or applies draconian business terms to the competition that their own business units get to ignore. They weren't just making interoperability harder by not documenting interfaces, but (in the case of iMessage) by actively breaking any attempt to interoperate.

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I’m not sure if you lived it, but Microsoft was actively targeting companies to destroy, and destroying companies because they could. Read about Mosaic, Be, their role in the SCO case, the Halloween documents, the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish philosophy.

Their monopoly case wasn’t about draconian terms. They were savagely destroying competition as a company culture.

Edit to add: bad terms on a vertically integrated platform is cute compared to Microsoft dictating what the entire PC industry was allowed to sell. It’s not that Windows was the best game in town, it was that vendors couldn’t sell Windows pre-installed if they sold anything else.

> Be

example https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

msft forced PC makers to ship bootloaders that would lockup on sight of Be's boot chain

They literally left comments in their code saying, "we should crash here if using DR-DOS". Digital Research had a compatible but different DOS implementation at the time.

I do remember Steve Jobs wanted "to go thermonuclear" on Android (mostly Samsung and Google), saying "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product."

Other motives, same behavior.

No, different behaviour. If Apple had announced its own Android derivative called Apple Android++, somehow forced all major OEMs to pre-install it, designed it such that 'Android' apps written for it wouldn't work on real Android, then killed it, that might be the sort of behaviour that would be closer to the mark.

Like, Steve Jobs making vague threats isn't really in the same league as what MS was getting up to in the 90s.

Different results. MS was pretty effective at destroying the competition.

Similar behavior would have been to go to all of the retailers and say they couldn’t sell iPhones if they sold Android phones.

Apple sued for patent infringement and that was about the extent of it.

Suggesting that their behavior is at Microsoft’s level is naive.

> Apple sued for patent infringement and that was about the extent of it.

You're massively understating the scope and scale of Apple's war on Android. Apple transfered patents to a NPE that sued Android vendors - possibly Google itself. Apple also spent billions on this war - Apple et al spent over $4B to outbid Google on Nortel patents, Google spent even more billions to buy Motorola and its patents, prior to that, Google had virtually no defensive parents.

I said Apple sued over patents, you said Apple sued over patents. I think we’re agreeing.

I'm quibbling with the phrasing of the last half of your sentence, as it's a bit of an understatement, no?

> that was about the extent of it

Apple didn't only sue over patents they already owned: they went out of their way and bought billions worth of more patents to sue with, partnered with patent-trolls who also sued OEMs on their behalf. So we agree, but the breadth and depth of Apple's actions was remarkable - they didn't just sue, they went to great lengths to do so.

> Other motives, same behavior.

If you are absolutely committed to doing zero further analysis, then sure I can see why you would think that.

To be fair, Apple today is more about going thermonuclear on apps inside its own ecosystem, as compared to Android or Android apps. (I don't mean just the commission rate, but the blatant copying of successful app concepts).

It is possible (and is) for both things to be true.

Both Apple and Microsoft were/are abusive of their market position.

It’s about the difference between someone saying something mean to people and someone killing people. Sure, they are both socially unacceptable, but we typically don’t equate those.

At the time Microsoft was caught logging all communication in computers was new and business leaders hadn't adapted to it, but today you want catch them with their pants down like that, so today we wouldn't know if Apple or Microsoft were deliberately targeting and killing companies since they know to say "We are doing this to serve the customer, killing that company was just an unfortunate side effect" and they know the US court wont go after them.

EEE is still very much alive nowadays, especially how they got into Linux spaces with WSL(2) and into the wider FLOSS community with the GitHub acquisition. We're just in the Extend phase at the moment.

> For nearly 10 years now Microsoft's VS Code has been the dominant text editor among the soydev community. I use it on my Microsoft Windows machine to write Microsoft Typescript code with help from the latest AI models in Microsoft Copilot, it installs my Microsoft npm packages, pushes my code to Microsoft Github and automatically deploys to Microsoft Azure which I then admire from the Microsoft Edge browser.[1]

For real it's scary how much developer experience is controlled by Microsoft.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGz7Ou0Nwo8

Apple doesn’t have 90% of the phone or computer markets. Microsoft had near total dominance over every desktop computer on the planet.

The only argument than can come close to that is Apple has a large share of phone app revenue because people using Android don’t pay as much.

Microsoft never attempted dominance of the kind Apple asserts. You look at threads like this: https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/issues/445

This doesn't just affect iOS users - if I want to use Briar to communicate, it's just impossible to involve anyone who has an Apple device. They don't need a total monopoly for this to be anti-competitive. They've made it so that if you have 10 devices and you want some feature like AirDrop, it's impossible for that feature to function unless Apple wrote it, because 4 of the devices are Apple devices and Apple monopolizes all network code to those devices.

Platform restrictions aside, maybe I’m missing something but requiring a permanent open socket seems like an awfully brittle design. There’s a lot of network conditions which phones are highly prone to that’d make apps with that requirement barely functional.

That's small potentates compared to what MS was doing. Windows was actively updated to break other browsers and then IE was actively leveraged to kill off competing browsers and server side web technology. For years the only thing that survived their onslaught was OSS.

And that's on the tech side of things, business wise they would do even less ethical things. If Apple bought Briar specifically to kill it because it ran on Android then you might get a taste of what MS was getting up to.

Dr Dos was a perfect example of MS trying to squash competitors. MS didn't tolerate ANYONE competing with them.

I HATE these arguments. Peter Thiel talked about this in one of his lectures. He said: when you're a small company you define your market as small as possible in order to compete; when youre a large company, you define your market as large as possible in order to avoid antitrust. To illustrate the example, if you're the only grocery chain in California, you'd argue that "the united states has many grocery chains and we're just one of them!" thats true, but it doesnt mean that you arent acting monopolistically from within California. To bring this analogy back to Apple, we have to look at areas of competition: the area of competition that Apple meaningfully engages in is the apple app store. This would be the equivalent of california. Is any app in the apple app store prevented from meaningfully competing with Apple? Yes! 1. higher prices via app store fees 2. not allowed access to the same apis (e.g. files syncing in the background or no native messaging capabilities) 3. browser + messaging restrictions (e.g. cant link to a website which has any way of spending money). The reason I look at the "app store" as a place of competition is because apple is allowing competition in the space. If Apple removed the app store, or ONLY had Apple apps in the app store, then they would be acting perfectly fine IMO. But they allow this competition because it allows their platform to succeed, but they behave monopolistically wrt that competition to gain the upper hand over time.

Interesting, I haven't quite seen that perspective before. The reasoning of Apple creating a market is the first argument that actually makes sense to me. And I actually agree with the spirit of it. I definitely lean very heavily on Apple's valid security issues, but the fees and deliberate blocking of things that have absolutely no security concerns are a problem.

The grocery chain example has one very important difference: You can choose to buy Apple - they aren't a monopoly by any means in any market. Whereas with the grocery chains - you must go to the store in California or not get groceries.

I think Peter Thiel's logic is flawed. Apple does not conglomerate, does not have a monopoly in any sense, and has actively avoided those situations. In order to please shareholders it does need to innovate and attempt new markets (Project Titan is a good example).

Microsoft in the 90s was completely different - they wanted domination.

They should remove non-apple apps from their 'marketplace' if this is not a market then. Or single out apps: only one tuner, only one recording, only one scanner... If they allow competition for everyone but themselves, it's anticompetitive behavior.

No, but they control access to nearly 100% of the IOS market (all devices except a tiny number of rooted ones).

That is a sensible definition in some cases because their terms for developers, app store charges etc. apply to that whole market. There is also a lot of lock-in and control: Spotify (much less any smaller business) cannot realistically get people to switch to Android to use their app - and with a duopoly that would not be an effective tactic long term anyway.

Does this apply to any software integrations provided by enterprise vendors? Can I use your logic to force Oracle/SAP to list random software on their "integrations" storefront?

I think the answer would be no, and for good reasons.

Do Oracle lock down devices so you cannot install other software on them?

Via license contracts, very much so (if you assume devices = their software as well as hardware).

Since people don’t seem to understand Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior, I recommend you start with Groklaw[0] and decide if you want to dive any deeper. Microsoft was akin to US Steel or Standard Oil. We really haven’t seen anything like it since.

0 - http://groklawstatic.ibiblio.org/staticpages/index.php%3fpag...

>Apple is predatory on a level that 1990s Microsoft could not have dreamed of.

That's hilariously wrong.

In the 1990s, there were only two computing platforms to speak of: Windows and the Mac. Windows had *90%* of the marketplace. Microsoft had deals with PC makers that required them to include (and charge for) a Windows license on ever machine they sold. When Netscape happened, Microsoft leveraged their immensely dominant desktop position to squeeze the upstart browser company out -- Gates famously said "I'll cut off your oxygen supply," which is more or less an overt confession to monopolistic behavior.

Nobody has anything close to the kind of market power and predatory behavior that MSFT had in 1996. To suggest otherwise is to either display profound ignorance of that period of time, or to show you have a weird axe to grind about Apple that causes you to overlook actual facts.

Yes, Microsoft had 90% of the desktop OS marketplace, and did use that dominance to gain an edge in other markets. But despite that large market share, their leverage was kind of limited by the platform being open. Apple, on the other hand, has unlimited technical leverage. They can make up whatever anti-competitive rule they want to, and enforce it totally.

When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it. When Apple chose to neglect Safari in exactly the same way (and probably for the same reasons as Microsoft did with IE6), that was it. There was no workaround, nor any way for anyone to compete with a better browser.

PC games are a >$50 billion market, with Microsoft only getting a small slice of that. That's because Microsoft wasn't just able to outlaw direct installs nor competing digital games stores. Games for Windows Live had to compete against e.g. Steam, with the predictable outcome. The size of the iOS gaming market is comparable. Apple collects a 30% cut of it, and will do so indefinitely. Competing with them is literally impossible; nobody else can make a different app store offering better terms or a better user experience.

Apple is at around 60% market share in the US. The difference between 60% and 90% is a minor difference in scale. The difference between Apple's absolute control of iOS vs. the limited control that Microsoft had over Windows is a difference in kind. Apple got to choose whether competing software was even allowed on the platform. They could opening up special capabilities to only their own software, and actually enforce that (unlike Microsoft, whose undocumented APIs could still be reverse engineered). They can charge their competitors a 30% cut of revenue, while obviously ignoring it in their internal accounting for their own competing businesses.

At what point did Apple neglect Safari?

They didn’t chase Google to implement features that solely benefit ChromeOS, but iPhones have completely dominated Android and any other browser engine for mobile rendering performance since the iPhone 4. A miserably slow browser that can receive push notifications is pointless.

Exactly. People claim Apple neglects Safari because its priorities are not aligned with Chrome's.

Maybe not allowing a website to store GBs of data, run in the background or show notifications is a feature for some users.

It’s really only been in the past 3 years or so that I’ve started to see real pushback from Devs on Apple being overly pushy. Prior to that so many of the complaints were on the order of “Apple won’t allow me to do [insert insanely user-hostile or non-performant thing here] woe is me!”

I've been a huge fan of Safari since its introduction.

My only major complaint is that they replaced the old dev tools by this current atrocity which forces me use Chrome for development.

IE and Safari are vastly different situations. IE started off with near-total dominance and was truly left to rot, with the teams responsible for it having been scattered across the company because Microsoft was no longer concerned with cornering the market on web browsers. Safari on the other hand has only ever seen ~20% marketshare, has never been truly abandoned, and at least covers core competencies well (recall that IE couldn’t even handle transparent PNGs without DirectX filter hackery). IE made even basic static pages a pain to develop compared to Firefox, whereas most of Safari’s significant shortcomings have to do with more advanced functionalities.

If Google got complacent and decided to reallocate nearly the entire Chrome and Blink teams to other projects leaving only tiny skeleton crews on them, allowing both Firefox/Gecko and Safari/WebKit to leave it in the dust in terms of features that would be almost a 1:1 analogue for the situation with Microsoft and IE back in the day.

Besides, IE was closed source and WebKIt is open source. So are all other engines. And web standards are really a thing now.

The late 90s early 2000s were a dark period, software-wise. Nothing compares to that, thankfully. People either forget, weren't there or were just oblivious Windows users.

> web standards are really a thing now.

Chrome starts a proposal, implements it and “intends to ship” it before anyone really has time to discuss it. Recently (2 months ago?) they introduced a new WebExtension API that nobody cared about nor really understood the need for, but it’s still there, making it look like it’s a “standard”

It’s far from perfect but no comparison to our lowest point in history.

> Besides, IE was closed source and WebKIt is open source. So are all other engines. And web standards are really a thing now.

Even today, this doesn't mean much if Apple decides to ignore web standards that are harmful to their business model. Web Notifications were implemented by Safari Desktop, Chrome Desktop and Firefox Desktop[0] in 2012 - and Safari Mobile in 2023. That's 9 years that a pretty useful and important API couldn't be relied on by PWAs. And this is just one of many examples.

This has a real effect on what technologies developers can actually use, which is fairly similar to the effect IE6 had on newer APIs during its time.

[0]: Chrome & Firefox desktop because I can't find a way to see historical dates for mobile on caniuse - but it was around that time, or a bit later, for mobile as well

> Safari on the other hand has only ever seen ~20% marketshare, has never been truly abandoned, and at least covers core competencies well (recall that IE couldn’t even handle transparent PNGs without DirectX filter hackery). IE made even basic static pages a pain to develop compared to Firefox, whereas most of Safari’s significant shortcomings have to do with more advanced functionalities.

The definition of what is a core feature and what is advanced functionality changes with time. When IE6 came out it was the most advanced browser available, including support for what was considered advanced functionalities back then. But over the long time IE6 existed expectations changed and things which were once advanced or not even thought of were now core. The same is happening with Safari, with the difference that thanks to Apples blocking of different browser engines people cannot just switch to another browser and light a fire under Apples ass.

My fear is that no matter how good Safari is or gets, it won’t be enough to withstand the crushing force that Chromium has become. Devs would much prefer to test against only one engine if they had the choice, which I believe will ultimately end up stripping choice from the user.

Many choices have already been stripped. My electric company’s payments portal only works in Chrome. When I called their helpdesk to say it doesn’t work in Safari, the person told me to use their iOS app instead of my phone’s browser.

When I told her I’m using Safari from my desktop she was confused. Her helpdesk script literally didn’t have a path in the reply tree for someone using a desktop and not using a chromium based browser. That should tell you how uncommon it must be. I guess everyone’s just using the App now and doesn’t notice.

I’ve encountered this several times in the past few years too, usually in the form of sites acting bizarrely or functions not working in Safari and/or Firefox. There’s been some active useragent sniffing too, though ironically enough in those situations it’s usually enough to spoof the user agent after which the sites in question as far as I can tell work properly.

Either way it gives the impression to non-technical users that non-Chromium browsers are subpar even if site devs are to blame (especially when “upgrade your browser” messaging is misused to equate your up-to-date Safari/Firefox with some derelict version that hasn’t been updated for years) and will only serve to strengthen Chrome’s hold. The only recourse Mozilla and Apple have are to perfectly emulate Chrome’s behavior and in the case of UA sniffing even pretend to be Chrome, which sounds an awful lot like the bad old days of Gecko needing to emulate IE to make sites work in Firefox.

> Microsoft had 90% of the desktop OS marketplace

As mentioned elsewhere, they didn’t get to 90% by selling to a free market. They demanded exclusivity across the entire PC market. They didn’t just let IE stagnate. They told Mosaic they would license their renderer for a percentage of sales and then gave IE away for free.

It would be like Apple saying if you wrote an iOS app you couldn’t write an app for any other platform.

The platform wasn’t “open.” Technologies like ActiveX were ways that Microsoft was trying to make the Internet depend on owning a Windows PC. Everything surrounding IE was an attempt to make other web browsers completely unviable.

I don’t know if you remember how it was back then, but huge chunks of the Internet simply did not work if you weren’t using Internet Explorer.

They would also sink your PC OEM business if you dared to ship a computer with an operating system alternative. They used their 90% marketshare to force companies like Dell to only sell computers with Windows installed. If someone like Dell wanted to provide an alternative like BeOS, Microsoft could terminate their contract or raise their royalty rate to unsustainable levels.

> When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it. When Apple chose to neglect Safari in exactly the same way (and probably for the same reasons as Microsoft did with IE6), that was it. There was no workaround, nor any way for anyone to compete with a better browser.

This isn’t even remotely true. The entire front-end web development ecosystem came to an absolute standstill in terms of browser support for five entire years because Microsoft decided that, since they had killed off the competition, they didn’t need to work on Internet Explorer any more. That’s five whole years without a single new release of Internet Explorer, which had >90% market share.

And then after they restarted development, the next version mainly focused on adding tabs and a few CSS selectors. It wasn’t until Internet Explorer 8 was released that it actually started to properly move forward again. But web developers still had to wait years before enough people had upgraded because Internet Explorer wasn’t evergreen and people didn’t upgrade very often.

Supporting Internet Explorer 6 was still a battle developers were fighting in 2010, nine years after it was released.

Apple releases new major versions of Safari with improved support for web standards every year like clockwork. And people upgrade promptly. And Apple take part in interop efforts with other browser vendors. The two situations are absolutely nothing alike.

>They can make up whatever anti-competitive rule they want to, and enforce it totally.

On iOS, maybe. MacOS isn't controlled in that way.

And, again, if you don't like iOS or Apple's rules, there's another completely viable OS you can use on mobile that actually has a larger global market share, so there's no monopoly play here.

>When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it

We have different definitions of long, and perhaps very different memories of the web from the years 2001-2012[0]

almost a decade for any real traction for competing web browsers to put a dent in Microsoft, and that is after the anti-trust trial and the EU browser ballot mandate.

Don't forget, it was so entrenched that even by 2015 IE had over 1/3 of browser share, really only defeated by Google Chrome (which had the infamous "kill IE" initiative[1]) in 2013 or there about.

To put it simply, a decade of dominance is a long time.

[0]: Data supports that Internet Explorer had majority market-share up through the first half of 2012 (globally), per https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid... and in North America, it held on to majority position through at least 2013.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...

You're comparing Microsoft's behavior now, after they've been smacked down in 1994 to how they operate now. MS had a long track record of breaking applications that competed with their offerings. If they hadn't been forced into the consent decree, they'd be 1)in a much stronger position than now, 2)behaving much worse.

IE6 was released in 2001, after the consent decree. So the reason other browsers were able to compete was because MS couldn't kneecap them.

30% is a huge difference.

What does MS charge game owners on Xbox? Sounds like the exact same thing. Xbox dominates the US console market [1] far more than iPhone does.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/console/north-ame...

> having the interfaces change with new releases every few years.

That's a level of stability many mobile and web developers dream of today ;)

Web APIs are forever. What's unstable are the dreadful frameworks built on top of it that people seem to think are essential.

"gopher" feels forgotten!

gopher is not web :)

One way I think they differ is that Apple is, at its core, traditionally a hardware vendor, whereas Microsoft is not.

You can, today, for example, install other OSes on Apple hardware, and they themselves have helped significantly to enable such until relatively recent architecture changes.

I, for example, run Fedora on a modern Macbook Air and it's super useful.

It's possible this reality deflects some of the antitrust attention.

But only on macOS hardware. All other devices have their boot loader locked.

It's possible that still buried in legal agreements between network operators and Apple there's a clause requiring Apple to ensure Apple knows what behaviors the network operators' networks will endure when Apple issued hardware connects.

I wonder (and can not prove, but remember this concern at Qualcomm and Apple back around then) if the issue was forced by Cingular Wireless originally.

In particular, iOS devices were dependent on carrier cooperation, and Cingular may have required only vetted software builds to connect to their network.

That's an artifact of them switching to the standard hardware platform of the industry for a while (basically a PC with some niceties on top). When it was PowerPC it was not as easy and your options were pretty limited.

And now with their custom silicon, no other system is officially supported and your "options" are basically hacks that can only use some parts of the hardware.

The platform is notoriously undocumented so it's not like if Apple is making it easy to install any other system. In fact, the best you can say is that they didn't outright block running other OSs but you can't really use the hardware properly that way (for example the fingerprint reader).

When it comes to iThings, they actually go out of their way to make sure you can't even install any version of the OS than what they chose (sometimes people run into cases where it's extremely annoying to be unable to downgrade the OS because the hardware has become way too slow to be useful).

So, when you say they helped significantly that makes me laugh, they used the fact that their hardware that was very close to the common PC could indeed boot other systems as a marketing tool but not much more.

Dude what the hell are you smoking Microsoft was 95% of the personal computer market in 1996 you can easily purchase an Android phone with no Apple influence.

Hell you don’t even need to buy a smartphone, That’s how little it has to do with the modern day. If you wanted the internet you had to go to Microsoft.

Isn’t it slightly different since Apple designs and sells the hardware with the OS, whereas Microsoft was manioulating entirely separate hardware companies and not designing their own hardware product (until recently)

> Apple hasn't been just making competing harder, but outright impossible.

That's why Android marketshare is much larger than iOS marketshare and why Windows marketshare is much larger than MacOS marketshare.

After reading maybe 8000 posts complaining about Apple "monopoly" I just can't get my head around how hackers can earnestly believe such a thing.

It makes a lot of sense to me.

I think a lot of people were less affected by Microsoft’s actions than by Apple’s. After all, Microsoft didn’t stop people from making money off their platform or modifying their computers.

And Microsoft was three decades ago.

Apple is causing people far more harm now than they remember Microsoft doing in the past. (Assuming they were around for it in the first place.)

Edit:

I should have said "a lot of the people talking" instead of just "a lot of people".

I was around for Microsoft and would classify them as evil. The worst you can say about Apple is they are greedy. For all of Apple's flaws, they are competing in the consumer market on merit.

If by "people" you mean "a vocal minority of app developers", then sure. But the average iOS user not only doesn't care about Apple's app store policies, they actively appreciate them (whether they know it or not).

All apps being required to use a single payment system is a great example: it sucks for the app developers but only for the app developers. From the consumer perspective, Apple's app store is the only place in the internet economy where they're not subject to pervasive dark patterns trying to get them to not cancel a subscription, not back out of a free trial, or otherwise separate them from their money. People pay good money for Apple phones in part because Apple successfully protects them from predatory anti-consumer behavior.

Contrast that with 90s Microsoft, where people bought Windows because that's mostly all that was available (because Microsoft made sure of that). Today there are more non-Apple phone choices than Apple choices, and yet a substantial number of people consistently choose Apple.

I'm both a developer, and a user.

As a user I love the ability to easily turn a subscription on and off, without having to call someone/chat with someone. Also, did you know that a requirement of the app store is you can delete your data from within the app? It's a great way to reduce your digital fingerprint.

As a developer, we rolled out in app subscriptions and our revenue essentially tripled. They handle refunds. That saves me a LOT of time.

Perfect? No, but I do as most pragmatists do: compromise and make the best of it.

In Europe we can do that without Appstore.

> doesn't care about Apple's app store policies, they actively appreciate them (whether they know it or not).

Don't think anyone actually noticed this fly past yesterday [0] but as I commented here [1] Apple have set out their position clearly as patrician and protective (under the dishonest guise of "security").

This is right for some people.

There is a place for the digitally bewildered, like a kind of care home for those who've basically given up on trying to make sense of their place in the digital world, given up all agency, and essentially conceded control of their lives. Ironically the polar opposite of Apple's 1984 Superbowl advert [2].

But we really ought to tell them they're being put out to pasture.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/security/complying-with-the-dma....

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39580678

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_(advertisement)

>After all, Microsoft didn’t stop people from making money off their platform or modifying their computers

This is incredible whitewashing of Microsoft. Microsoft didn’t stop people from modifying their computers? Part of the anti trust case was Microsoft ending licenses with OEMs if they dared to sell a PC with Linux installed.

I was referring to after purchase. Wasn't it still possible to install Linux on computers that came with Windows?

Granted, drivers were a massive issue.

And if anything, this only furthers the point that Apple isn't anything close to what Microsoft was doing.

I think they fiddled with the bootloader of some pc vendors in the mid-90s,but we're quickly told to stop that. It might have destroyed a competitor though.

> After all, Microsoft didn’t stop people from making money off their platform or modifying their computers.

That is literally what they did.

Be built a business, lined up customers, and had every one of them fail because of exclusivity agreements with Microsoft. Unless you were a vertically integrated software/hardware business you couldn’t get your OS on PCs because of Microsoft.

It might seem quaint now, but there was a market for web browsers! They weren’t free until Microsoft duped Mosaic into giving them a license for a percentage of sales and then gave it away for free as Internet Explorer, instantly destroying any market for selling web browsers. That’s not only preventing others from making money on their platform, but anyone from making money in that entire segment.

Literally the entire world was affected by Microsoft’s business practices as the PC industry was booming.

Implicit to that statement is "on apple machines".

Android market share is on non-macs, an non-iphones.

This isn't about marketshare, it's about Apple making things impossible. You're a hacker, tell me how I can solve this problem:

I am with a friend in a place with no Internet access. They have an iPhone. I have an Android phone. We don't have any cables. My friend took a video and I would like them to send me the video right now over Wifi.

I think there are some ways I could solve it, but I don't think there are any ways I could solve it that would be reliable for nontechnical users (and even for me it's hard.) This isn't an accident, Apple is abusing their control over iOS to make this sort of thing impossible. And it's worse than anything Microsoft ever did. Apple is actively standing in my way, even though I don't own any iOS devices.

> You're a hacker, tell me how I can solve this problem:

Feem, but I'm interested to learn more about this contrived example where phones don't have internet access and so can't use SHAREit, Send Anywhere, or any number of other solutions.

Not a contrived example. happens to me often and iOS users are paralyzed when AirDrop doesn't work. (And like, it is possible but it's a lot harder than it should be.) People who transfer lots of media for work don't even bother, they just accept AirDrop as the only functional solution, which means you carry an iOS device.

Gotcha. In addition to the off- and online apps above, it looks like web-based solutions like snapdrop.net work on Safari/iOS as well.

Without prior downloads happening before going offline I’m not sure you could share a file between mobile operating systems out of the box, regardless of which OS is trying to supply the file.

If I’m allowed to pre-download software before encountering your scenario, running a web server or an app that serves FTP or other server types hosting files is trivial on either OS. iOS may require shuffling the video file into an app sandbox first.

> This isn't about marketshare, it's about Apple making things impossible.

Of course it is about marketshare. The more you have, the more you can make things hard for your competitors. The less you have, the more you're the weird one with the odd platform.

> I am with a friend in a place with no Internet access

That's a vanishingly rare situation not worthy of legislation, IMO.

> And it's worse than anything Microsoft ever did

In 2003 I bought a PowerBook. It was the only commercially available laptop that could be bought without buying a Windows license. Microsoft had put any competitors out of business by that point and OEMs weren’t ready to sell Linux laptops. Apple only existed because Microsoft injected them with cash to show they had a competitor.

Get a USB drive.

You've been able to access SMB shares from the Files app just fine for years now. Linux supports SMB. Windows supports SMB. You're welcome.

So now I have to lug my synology file share around just in case I want to share a file with a friend, instead of just transmitting it wirelessly?

The answer is obvious, play the video on one phone and film the screen with the other.

It looks like Samsung and Google only merged their airdrop utilities in Summer 2023, so how would you have done this with two different android phones?

Think in terms of market power, not share.

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