The most vociferous Microsoft haters slammed the company for being a greedy industry bully that used its monopolistic, clunky, copycat operating system to force software on users and coerce partners into unfair licensing deals.
Don't look now, but the role of the industry's biggest bully is increasingly played by Apple, not Microsoft. Here's a look at how Apple has shoved Microsoft aside as the company with the worst reputation as a monopolist, copycat and a bully.
Source: pcworld.com
People
love iPods (including me; my family of four has purchased 12 iPods in
the past few years). But iPods come bundled with iTunes. Want to buy
music from Apple? Guess what? You must install iTunes. Want an Apple
cell phone from AT&T? Yep! ITunes is required even if you want only
to make phone calls. Want to buy ringtones for your Apple phone?
ITunes.
Apple not only "bundles" iTunes with multiple
products, it forces you to use it. At least with Internet Explorer, you
could always just download a competitor and ignore IE.
Not
fair, you might say. Any hardware device that syncs data with a PC as
part of its core functionality has software to facilitate that syncing.
True enough. But operating systems have browsers as part of core
functionality, too. Doesn't Mac OS X come with Safari? Doesn't the
iPhone?
And "bundling" works. Steve Jobs bragged this week
that Apple has distributed 600 million copies of iTunes to date. The
overwhelming majority of those copies were iTunes for Windows. And
iTunes for Windows' popularity isn't driven by software product
quality. ITunes is the slowest, clunkiest, most nonintuitive
application on my system. But I need it because I love my iPods.Source: pcworld.com
Tags: copycat | greedy | haters | Internet Explorer | iPhone | iPod | itunes | LICENSING | Microsoft | monopolist | operating system | slammed | software | windows
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