What made Microsoft so predatory is that they wanted to dominate the market and squash any competitors, and drive everything into a Microsoft monoculture. Apple doesn't act in the same way, and only seems to care about profits and products rather than marketshare. So even if Apple does something that seems incredibly controlling, you don't have to worry, because you can always buy somebody else's product. Microsoft was trying to make it so you couldn't buy anybody else's product.

While Apple and Microsoft are very different animals with a completely different corporate culture, there are interesting similarities in their behaviour. That doesn't mean we should simply class them as exactly the same, as there are profound differences in their founding culture, outlook, and aspirations.

However once a corporation reaches a certain size, or perhaps in the process of reaching a certain size, corporations and other social tribes seem to acquire remarkably similar characteristics - the company becomes an ecosystem within which it is possible to thrive without actually serving the long-term interests of the company or customers at all - the corporate culture changes to one in which the most important achievement is to do well within the company, and others outside the company become a remote concern.

Perhaps this is inevitable when a company reaches the size of say Apple, Amazon or Microsoft - all of which have in their different ways abused their market position, and abused their power over smaller companies and competitors in order to make more money. They may not have broken the law very often, but they are all profoundly anti-social in their behaviour. All have tried to lock their customers in to ecosystems over which they have complete control (iOS, Kindle, Windows/Office), all have abused their power over their partners to make unreasonable demands, and all have ignored the long-term interests of their customers in pursuit of profit. They do this because they can, because no-one is stopping them, and because as a collective entity what is safest is for them to stamp out all competition anywhere - to completely dominate the marketplace (at least in the short term, ignoring that this is impossible in the long-term).

Perhaps that's just a natural outcome of capitalism, but as we have stronger limits in other areas of corporate malfeasance (for example regulations on pollution), we do perhaps need limits on the power of these larger companies in the marketplace which are stronger than antitrust laws (which seem to be unused and out of date at the present time).

We've seen Apple morph over the last 10 years (as MS did before it against IBM) from scrappy underdog to dominant corporation, and the transformation means that now they feel happy to arbitrarily ban partners from their devices (e.g. Google Voice, Kindle in-app purchase), sabotage their own production partners (e.g. Samsung), gouge partners with arbitrary licensing (iPod connectors), and ignore the effects on their users, or indeed on their own long-term survival. They are different from the Microsoft of the 90s (perhaps less cut-throat, a little less predictable), but in important ways are similar, and they're storing up the same sort of long-term resentment which is now undermining Microsoft in the consumer space. For example by banning all transactions on their devices which don't involve giving Apple a cut, they annoy both their users and their partners - the only entity this action serves is Apple, and that only in the short term.

I'm not so sure that it's ironic as inevitable. There are exceptions, but the winners of this marketshare game tend to be those who are willing to play at least a little dirty.