Why every iPhone/iPad owner needs to read this.

Why every iPhone/iPad owner needs to read this.
blog.zapdrive.com

2) Apple’s ecosystem is designed to create lock in and generate monopolistic profits. This actually is the goal of all businesses until their market becomes mature.

3) At the mature stage, businesses seek to compete on price and everyone’s “economic profits” are lowered to zero.

I don’t know if storage is at the point where it can be offered at breakeven at $20/year, but if it is, congratulations, you at least helped ruin Dropbox’s “greedy monopoly”. That being said, you have little chance at ruining Apple’s monopoly. You can decide to hurt it though by offering your product on Andriod for $20/year, and Apple for $28/year.

You also gain the benefit of targeting the “right customers” in the sense that Andriod customers are more focused on price, where Apple’s customers are more focused on looking cool. (no offence meant for either group, just simplifying for the sake of it).

I’d love to hear how you are able to gain such a huge cost advantage over the other companies in this space.

That's what I take from the article. People got up in arms in a way that was much stronger against Microsoft during IE's early years and whining for Netscape (who lost because they just made a shitty browser, it wasn't 100% because of bundling IE with windows. Netscape Navigator 4 was terrible and slow compared to IE.) much more than people do against Apple, even though we could install an alternative browser, which is something you can't even do on the iPhone and iPad (without a modern JS engine you might as well give up, there isn't a single browser on iOS that is not based on the internal webkit and a JIT-lacking javascript engine. There's the oddball, Opera, that does all the rendering in their server farms, but they don't allow anything that runs locally).

There were even talks of cutting Microsoft into multiple companies, one that makes office, one that makes windows etc. Only people who have been around during those years would know what I'm talking about, but MS was hated to a point you couldn't begin to imagine in 2012, for something that wasn't even a bit as bad as Apple post-iOS.

I can't believe the crap Apple gets away with, they are getting away with so much that even Microsoft is now following their lead, Windows Mobile had far less restrictions compared to Windows Phone and Windows 8 on ARM which are both reactions to iOS rather than something MS thought of doing before the tide that iOS (and Android) did to the smartphone market. Windows Mobile wasn't open source, but the user was as free to install and use apps as they are now with Android. It's not the case anymore, and there won't be anything like Chrome or Firefox or (locally rendering) Opera for Windows 8 tablets on ARM. Only on x86 and only because they know how much of an uproar it'd be with current x86 users, because if they could close everything down and get away with it, they would, which is why we should be as loud as possible to show that we don't want this kind of future for our computing devices.