[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Just came across this thread:

Apple clobbers the competition—Commentary: The carnage of Apple’s spectacular success

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Posted on Fri 24 Sep 2010 05:34:41 PM PST by Swordmaker

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Apple Inc. is a Death Star. It pulls in most of what comes into its orbit and either overtakes or assimilates it.

The success of the company is particularly spectacular because it is largely a four-product enterprise, consisting of the iPad, iPod, Mac, and iPhone. It also produces a suite of supporting software that includes its OSX, the Safari browser, iTunes, and the App Store. These non-hardware products knit together the “iProduct” universe.

[Dr. Sivana]

Apple Inc. is a Death Star. It pulls in most of what comes into its orbit and either overtakes or assimilates it.

Agreed. I like Macs and iOS just fine, but Apple is not loyal to its allies.

They undercut the loyal chain of independent Apple dealers when they made special deals with CompUSA. Let Microsoft save its bacon and turned on them in that series of ads. At one point Adobe was considering putting Mac version of the crucial CS seies on the back burner, or even dropped. Apple begs them not to, and then turns around and bashes Flash.

Business is business, but this kind of behavior (and I won't even go through the NUMEROUS hardware problems with end users over the years, where Apple behaved badly) really precludes the possibly of having a romantic vision of Apple.

That said, they make some great products.