Like, there's no strategy at all here? Just keep swinging and hope you land a blow that breaks through the armor? This is how my 15 year old plays VR games.
Picking these petty fights or whining about getting fined is not helpful, certainly not to Apple and their shareholders. It's hard not to conclude that Apple leadership is making stupid emotional decisions rather than rational ones, which is especially dumb when you're running a trillion dollar company.
Since, ultimately, his duty as a CEO is to prioritize the financial wealth of shareholders. If he just complied with the EU then he'd be voted out by the board by the end of the week.
Is he going overboard? I think so. But I've also never owned a $2T+ company with investors and an entire government breathing down my neck.
Most companies like Facebook and Microsoft quietly comply with the rules as best they can with as little fanfare as possible. Maybe after paying a fine or two. As far as I know, there hasn't been any oustings because of that.
Microsoft was acting like this in the 90s. I think history is just repeating itself with Apple.
So... the difference was Microsoft was winning those fights because their enemy was other products in the market. They'd tell Dell not to ship Netscape, and Dell would yank the product. They'd clone java, and websites would code to that to get IE compliance. They'd push ActiveX and bribe web properties to implement it, and they would. This wasn't fair, but it was at least in some sense "competition". (I mean, eventually MS would go on to lose control of all those levers, but over decades of timescale and generally due to market motion.)
Apple here is just flailing. It's a regulatory action, not a competitor. There's no feasible path to beating or evading EU law. Surely they know that, right?
Google just needs to allow for the selection of a default browser, provide links in Google search to competing sites (which Google will still make money off of with their ad delivery network anyway), opt-out option for sharing data between YT, Search, Maps, etc. As well as allow outside payment processors for apps.
For Microsoft and Google, none of these changes are affecting their cash cow. Cloud computing for MS, and ads for Google.
These DMA changes are affecting Apple's cash cow, the iPhone. and their second largest cash cow, Services and IAP. Apple has a LOT more on the line with these DMA changes than MS or Google do.
None of the large tech companies lack of embarrassment.
I feel like the whole fiduciary responsibility bit is always the foundation of terrible arguments. As if every individual choice that earns a dollar is therefore forced.
Earning multiple billion dollar fines is not serving shareholders. Sabotaging the future is not serving shareholders. Destroying goodwill is not serving shareholders.
Apple's various tantrums and desperate clutching onto their market hasn't remotely been beneficial for the company, and I'd argue it is a big reason the company has started plateauing. Like how Valve went from being a game maker to being a purveyor of gambling crates and keys, Apple is desperately pimping for every bit of rent-seeking and service fees.
> Earning multiple billion-dollar fines is not serving shareholders.
Correct, and until Apple is threatened with fines, I believe they'll continue doing this until it no longer serves them.
I don't find the tantrums to be the cause of the plateauing, I think they're a response to it. The iPhone is their #1 money-maker (by a massive margin at that), and the smartphone market as a whole has been plateauing. That's why we've seen a shift over the years towards services, which is their #2 money-maker now. When the DMA strongly affects both of these revenue streams, tantrums will ensue.
I'm not agreeing that what they're doing is correct, and I think it's shitty for a company that I consider the reason I got into the dev/design space to begin with to start acting like this. But I do see some business logic behind why they're doing what they're doing, even when it goes against what I know is correct.
Commission fines Apple over €1.8 billion over abusive App store rules for music streaming providers.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
Maybe tripping up the same entity that's already on to you with other fines for similar behavior is not that smart.