RE: Re: Apple at it again..

["Ian Lowe" <ianlowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>There is no legal obligation here.



Apple holds a monopoly position, and therefore *DOES* have a legal
obligation not to conduct it's business in a predatory or non competitive
way. The EU has already investigated Apple back in 2005 for price rigging,
then again in 2007 for breaching anti-trust law.

Hopefully, they will have a close look at them again this year.

>It's not like Apple have an monopoly state in the computing universe.
They
have a minor ~10% desktop stake.



Apple has a 74% market share in the portable media player universe, whilst
Creative, Samsung and Microsoft combined have a share of about 10%. It's
almost a complete reversal of the desktop PC market. In this market sector,
Apple are the monopolist, not Microsoft - and they are abusing that
position.

Proprietary lock in harms the consumer - and that applies equally whether
we
are talking about Microsoft changing APIs to muck about the Linux devs, or
Apple changing the iTunes stack to muck around competing hardware vendors.

The home automation arena demonstrates more clearly than most the harm of
proprietary locked down systems - how many more new vendors are we going to
see launch a 'not quite complete' range of gadgets and gizmos, only to
crash
and burn a few months later because there wasn't the market drive?

Open and free is the way forward - and delivers the best results for
companies and consumers alike.











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