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Comment by jdw64 | Hacker News Reader

After reading this story, I do think Apple is bad, but from a business perspective, it makes sense. (By 'business perspective,' I mean it's immoral but profitable.)

Because if CD Baby was acting as a middleman and a gateway for indie music distribution, Apple's move to shut it out was about preventing power from becoming decentralized and keeping control concentrated in Apple's hands to position iTunes as a premium platform. On top of that, if CD Baby had monopolized the indie music market, any future platform would only need to deal with CD Baby, which would have been a burden down the line.

It was likely a strategy to capture the entire music market. Sometimes I wonder why people don't get as angry at Apple as they do at Microsoft. I don't know what the image is like in the US. Personally, I've always thought Apple's premium strategy is terrible

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> Sometimes I wonder why people don't get as angry at Apple as they do at Microsoft.

Apple was the underdog at a point where Microsoft got its bad image by virtue of it's monopolistic practice. I can't help but think that a lot of it is a combination of inertia and MS pissing off a sufficient subset of geeks at a point where we made up a much larger proportion of the online discourse and so could set the tone. And for at least a time, in part by virtue of MS bad reputation, a subset of geeks saw Apple as a possible saviour.

It also helps that for all of its calculated business behaviour, Apple also has a reputation for better quality that makes people want to give them passes for things MS wouldn't get a pass for.

Microsoft also had more instances of being petty, (see the bit about join press releases in Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp_ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup ), vindictive (bundling Internet Explorer rather than having two separate produces, an HTML display component coded to the standard and usable by all apps and a browser application which also used it and optionally extended it), and even destructive (poster child for this is MacBasic: https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html but there are two many instances to note and researching more instances is left as an exercise for the reader).

At least Apple's destructiveness was mostly related to market realities and their own product (still waiting for a replacement for my Newton MessagePad --- my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ sort of works (but not daylight viewable), my Kindle Scribe ColourSoft is quite nice, but way too limited and no 3rd party apps other than what can be done via PDFs or HTML)).

I think this is essentially it. Couple with the thought that there's nowhere else to turn, Apple laptops and phones are the best choice in a bucket of bad choices.

I could list endlessly the issue with iPhones and Macbooks, but they're _just_ more convenient enough to have to use them over alternatives. Lots of little examples like the way that Airpods work when jumping from the same video call on my phone to my Mac for example, add up to be useful enough to put up with just how shitty iPhones are.

> By 'business perspective,' I mean it's immoral but profitable.

So, the purest form of evil there is?

> Sometimes I wonder why people don't get as angry at Apple as they do at Microsoft.

They are indeed just as bad as each other. I think Microsoft just got unlucky and had a lot of bad-PR emails leak. If that had happened at Apple he'd probably have someone killed.

I was a sysadmin through the 90's and my distaste for Microsoft was that it wasn't plug and play and they would distribute software on 35 floppy disks instead of a CD-ROM. Finally their business practice. If Microsoft was unlucky, remember we make our own luck.

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