Its true, I'm amazed they are able to get away with it too. Microsoft simply bundled software, but never did it outright prevent competition on its OS. Apples closed garden is outright blocking competition... How is no one looking into this?
As pointed out below 1) they don't have a monopoly.
2) It wasn't just the bundling of IE, but also the use of APIs to prefer and favor IE over third party browsers, and restrictive agreements with OEMs.
Also part of the finding of fact in the case was the nature of how web browsers were obtained in that time period, long, slow downloads. Giving the bundled option a serious advantage. But again before we even get into the anticompetitive-ness of Apple, which no doubt many of their practices are, without a monopoly, it's fair play.
IANAL either, but I have looked into this quite a bit. There are other ways anticompetitive behavior can be prosecuted, but they don't seem to apply to what Apple is doing here: http://www.ftc.gov/bc/edu/pubs/consumer/general/zgen01.pdf
That PDF provides a pretty good summary of the FTCs scope, and under the current mobile market, it doesn't seem like they'd have any reason to involve themselves, especially when alternatives readily exist.
Apple has 25% mobile market share. Android has 50%. Microsoft has about 90% desktop market share for over a decade. DirectX was made to kill off OpenGL. C# was made to kill off Java and keep software running on Windows. Microsoft killed of Netscape and a decade later IE6 isn't completely dead.
Android isn't going away and by my estimate it will always have more market share than iOS.
Btw, Microsoft completely killed of all other PC operating systems when they required PC vendors to pay for shipping DOS, regardless of the OS they actually shipped.
C# was made to kill Java as Apple maps were made to Kill Google Maps but they did not prevent Java from being installed, which is what apple is doing. If they want to win by keeping the loyalty of the users they should not cut off all competition but just release a better product than the competition. Apple successed in this in the last years but the more time passes the more I see they are struggling with it, the prefer to kill off any other opportunity, but this will enrage users(at least those who were not brainwashed)
When companies write apps in C# for the Microsoft platform, they are going to pretty much stay on the Microsoft platform. Those apps, for the most part, aren't ported to the Mac and Linux (please skip the Mono discussion, it's not a 100% solution). Fortune 500 companies and commercial companies are locking consumers into Windows. Maps is one product. There are thousands of C#, Windows only apps.
When companies write apps in Objective-C for the Mac or iOS platforms, they are going to pretty much stay on the Apple platforms. Those apps, for the most part, aren't ported to the Windows and Linux (please skip the GCC discussion, it's not a 100% solution). Fortune 500 companies and commercial companies are locking consumers into Apple. There are thousands of Objective-C, Apple only apps.
That's is correct and obvious, so I thought it went without saying. Btw, there are hundreds of thousands of little iOS only apps.
If Apple had a monopoly, or even close to one, in phones then we would have a problem. However, Android leads by a wide margin and since they sell better in the rest of the world, Apple's little walled garden doesn't really matter.
My point is that creating a custom language is not necessarily a move intended to create or preserve a monopoly. Microsoft felt that the best way to innovate in the developer space was to produce a modern framework with a core set of modern languages (and to open that framework up for 3rd party integration, such as Delphi). It's unreasonable to expect that Microsoft should be limited to C++ (a non-managed and non-modern language) and Java (a language a competitor controls) for development.
Microsoft writes most of its software in C++. They love C++. If C# wasn't the only case then it might be acceptable. DirectX, for example, was done to kill off OpenGL. Microsoft hired away Borland's language team, including the Delphi developer and proceeded to build a better Java that only ran well on Windows, and some might say that they accomplished this. :-)
Objective C was developed before Steve Jobs and he simply adopted it, or his engineers did at NeXT. Personally, I'd like open languages/platforms that offer a little more reuse.
> Microsoft writes most of its software in C++. They love C++.
Microsoft writes most of its systems-level software in C++. Microsoft also writes a lot of C#. WCF and WPF are both built on the .Net stack. Bing runs on ASP.NET. Lots of stuff at Microsoft is build in C#, for the same reasons lots of stuff outside of Microsoft is build in C#: it's modern, safe, fast, and pleasant to work in.
> If C# wasn't the only case then it might be acceptable. DirectX, for example, was done to kill off OpenGL.
No, DirectX was written to replace WinG, which is what most games for Windows were written in prior to DirectX. I don't believe OpenGL had any traction on Windows at that time.
> Microsoft hired away Borland's language team, including the Delphi developer and proceeded to build a better Java that only ran well on Windows, and some might say that they accomplished this. :-)
This might be interesting if Microsoft had hired James Gosling away from Sun to work on C#, but that's not what happened. They hired staff away from Borland, who didn't design Java at all. You're conflating unrelated things.
> Objective C was developed before Steve Jobs and he simply adopted it, or his engineers did at NeXT. Personally, I'd like open languages/platforms that offer a little more reuse.
I fail to see the relevance here. The Objective-C used by Apple today is by no means the same as the Objective-C that NeXT started with. NeXT and Apple extended Objective-C significantly at both the language and the library level. This the the "embrace, extend, extinguish" cycle you accuse Microsoft of.
Sorry you fail to see the relevance. Objective-C isn't owned by Apple in any way, shape or form. Of course, they are going to try to improve the language. They sort of have to make it modern since they built their systems around it. Apple's compiler an open source project: http://clang.llvm.org/ Will Microsoft ever open source their C# compiler? That would be a great boon for making the language cross platform.
Objective-C isn't owned by Apple? Who else is using it? Of the few other people who are using it, how many are using it without Apple's extensions? Apple does indeed de facto own Objective-C. They control it. They have embraced it, extended it, and extinguished anyone else who might have had a claim on it.
It's strange too that you have a problem with C# being proprietary, but you don't have a problem with Java being proprietary. Oracle owns both the language and the implementations that everyone uses. That it's part of their business plan to maintain it for Linux does not change its fundamental nature.
And just so you know, Microsoft did open the source for C# under admittedly restrictive terms. Look up Rotor. And they have issued a Community Promise that protects projects like Mono. And yes, Mono counts, just as surely as GCC counts, unless Microsoft also owns C++.
Objective-C is an open source project, like the webkit browser. Google adopted webkit for Chrome, for example. There is nothing prevent anyone else from adopting Objective C. Your logic is pretty flawed. Just because Objective C has not gained wide adoption doesn't mean that it's not open to be adopted. Google uses "Java" for Android. Java is open source. You can download the source and build it.
Mono is fine but it's not nearly as good as Microsoft's compiler. C# is a great language. It would be great if Microsoft simply open sourced it.
It really doesn't matter if it owns 25% or 90% of the OS space. Anti-competitive practices are business or government practices that prevent or reduce competition in a market. That is exactly what Apple is doing.
Of course it matters. Buy an Android or Microsoft phone; leave iOS behind. There's plenty of choice. If you don't like Apple's practices, buy from the competition. If you don't like Microsoft's monopoly, you'll find that it's a lot harder to ignore them. Many software companies only have Windows version because that's 90% of the market.
You picked some really strange examples if you want to show that Microsoft follows the EEE pattern.
DirectX was made to kill off OpenGL. - DirectX was never compatible with OpenGL. It was created to provide a Windows-95 replacement for WinG which was being deprecated. OpenGL wasn't even originally intended for gaming, which is why it had software emulation for missing hardware features.
C# was made to kill off Java and keep software running on Windows. - C# was also never compatible with Java. Calling it an extension of Java is like calling Ruby an extension of Perl. C# was created to fill a gaping hole in the Windows development world: building native apps in a modern language. Java is ill-suited to building applications that feel native on Windows. It doesn't have easy interop, the UI looks wrong, and it requires installing a huge JRE. On top of that, Java progress at the language level was pretty stagnant. Lambdas, delegates, generics? Sun wasn't interested in any significant new features until C# appeared.
Microsoft killed of Netscape and a decade later IE6 isn't completely dead. Can't argue that one.
The difference between Microsoft and Apple is that Microsoft was controlling (or trying to control) the whole ecosystem of PC makers. Apple doesn't want to do this, exactly because they don't want to open their platform for other players the way Microsoft used to do. What they want is to maintain tight control over their closed systems (iOS/MacOS X). And this is not really news, Apple always played by these rules and their customers know how it works.
This way of operating is what most tech commentators don't really understand. I think the beauty of this strategy is that you don't need to have a monopoly to make the most profits. At any time, there will be a majority of the market using other products, but since Apple is optimizing their platform for quality and high profit margin, they will command the leadership in profits (if they continue doing good products that maintain their customers happy, I mean).
You're looking at the wrong market. The problematic market isn't mobile operating systems, it's the distribution of apps to iOS devices. By excluding other app stores from iOS, Apple has created itself a monopoly on the distribution of apps to its existing base of mobile device customers.
"Apple does not have a monopoly in the mobile OS space."
That's not necessarily correct. To determine if they have a monopoly you need to look at the amount of software sold on each platform, not just the number of total devices for each OS.
