“As I read Dan Lyons’ Newsweek tome this week about the evolving Big Bad Apple and how it is becoming a Microsoft monopolist in training, it struck me as odd. And bordering on unfair,” Jim Goldman writes for CNBC. “Full disclosure: I loved Fake Steve. But there’s something in Lyons’ real voice as an Apple wag that just rings hollow.”
“He writes that not long ago, Apple was a niche player. But today it’s a mega player so powerful that smaller competitors are forced to live on its scraps to survive. Wait a second! It’s not as if Apple paid some magical fee and instantly became what it is today. The company slaved and sweat and innovated and built a better musical mousetrap (thank you iPod) and millions beat a path to Cupertino. Apple indeed became powerful and successful but because it earned it,” Goldman writes.
MacDailyNews Take: Unlike Microsoft, which, if you will remember, used a poorly written contract signed by an unprepared sugared water salesbozo to poorly rip-off Apple the last time the Cupertino-based innovator slaved and sweat and innovated and built a better musical mousetrap, the Macintosh.
Goldman continues, “Lyons suggests that innovations in AppleTV, as an example, are leading to the demise of a smaller competitor called Vudu, which had been “winning rave reviews” for its competing product. In January, he writes, “Apple struck back,” expanding its own movie catalog, lowering its prices, and (*gasp) improving its product, leading — Lyons surmises — to Vudu layoffs. Huh? Did Apple do something wrong there?”
MacDailyNews Take: Of course not. Lyons is just being his usual R.A. self. This time with a particularly amateurish, highly-flawed “argument” to boot.
Goldman continues, “Is Lyons suggesting that innovating, that economic Darwinism, is somehow bad? I thought this was America.”
Lyons “compares iPod/iPhone and their exclusive connection to the iTunes digital media store to Microsoft’s operating system and its control of the applications that run on it. This is a red herring at its finest: Microsoft achieved its monopoly through arm-twisting and predatory behavior,” Goldman writes. “Apple enjoys massive digital music market share not because it threatened all of us to buy an iPod, but because it had the foresight and influence to build an easy-to-use, convenient and fairly priced online store to go along with it.”
Goldman writes, “I think Lyons simply misses the point: ‘want to’ versus ‘have to.’ Apple customers ‘want to.’ Microsoft customers ‘have to.’ Well, it was ‘have to’ until, ironically, Apple came along.”
Full article – highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s nice to see that others are noticing Lyons for what he is, too. If you haven’t yet bookmarked Jim Goldman’s Tech Check over on CNBC.com, please do so now. His articles about Apple Inc. are usually fair, interesting, and informative; in other words, everything that Dan R.A. Lyons’ scribbles aren’t.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Mike in Helsinki" for the heads up.]
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