The crucially important subtlety here is that Apple requiring developers to use the App Store doesn't leverage an existing monopoly (like what Microsoft had with Windows).
Compare the games console market. Nintendo is allowed to say you have to go through them to sell games for the Switch, ditto Microsoft with the Xbox. Sony doing the same thing with the Playstation is exactly equivalent, but they're approaching the sort of market dominance where it might soon be illegal for them (and them alone) to do that in some markets.
> The crucially important subtlety here is that Apple requiring developers to use the App Store doesn't leverage an existing monopoly (like what Microsoft had with Windows).
Copyright (e.g. over iOS) and patent (e.g. over iPhone hardware) are explicitly government-granted monopolies. Having that monopoly is allowed on purpose, but that isn't the same as it not existing, and having a government-granted monopoly and leveraging into another market are two quite distinct things.
> Compare the games console market.
Okay, all of the consoles that require you to sell you to sell through their stores shouldn't be able to do that either.
> but they're approaching the sort of market dominance where it might soon be illegal for them (and them alone) to do that in some markets.
Wait, your theory is that a console with ~50% market share has market dominance but Apple with ~60% of US phones doesn't?
There’s no such thing as “having a monopoly on iPhone” in law. You have to have a monopoly in a market, of which iPhone is part of the “smartphone” market. It is not a monopoly in the smartphone market, to the best of my knowledge.
Well “had to use” is a strong phrase here. Linux was already around and you could have used it too with your hardware. I think you can always bend an argument to fit your point.
Didn’t knew that, but only if they also sold windows pc? Like, if a company would only sold blank PCs without any offering associated to MS they wouldn’t need to pay MS anything.
That was the what the trial about. If you wanted to contract with MS you had to pay for a license on every box shipped. Dell, Compaq, Gateway, HP, IBM, Acer, and others had to sign the contract or ship only alternate OS’s
If one sold a computer with OS/2 they also paid for a windows license.
I second this! Excel is a front end everybody knows and everybody can run. I always got laughed at when I say the biggest competitor of small apps (things like gym diary, meal planner etc.) is excel. Now that it even support python…
Indeed, but these normal APIs have runtime costs for bounds checking. For some use cases, unsafe can be better. For instance, last time I used a memory-mapped file was for a large immutable Bloom filter. I knew the file should be exactly 4GB, validated that in the constructor, then when testing 12 bits from random location of the mapped file on each query, I opted for unsafe codes.
It is a matter of the deployment scenario, in the days people ship Electron, and deploy production code in CPython, those bounds checking don't hurt at all.
When they do, thankfully there is unsafe if needed.
That’s sounds like it should be even better to threaten people’s life to motivate them to be more innovative.
I think the best way to be innovative is to have peace of mind and be able to focus on something without being distracted by fear. Fear as a motivator doesn’t sound right.
They don’t care because Musk is marketing Tesla not as a car company but as a technology company (building robots and self driving rental service). And why does he do that? Maybe because his car sales are down…
I always assumed “tech company” meant using technology to build a fundamentally better car from the ground up. I don't know at what point the bait-and-switch happened, it was suddenly about pursuing every stupid moonshot fantasy at the cost of making better cars.
I thought it was always a tech company focused around trying to import things from the future. Since before they ever had enough sales that sales could go down.
However, I remember the anecdote of how France has two different companies for the trains and trainstations. The first ordered trains which were a little bit to wide for the trainstations, due to a miss communication.
When I read about this, I thought „this could have been Germany too.“
Just an example… and yes, I know the EU ruling but it’s still fitting.
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