“The changes are a testament to the remarkable turnaround orchestrated by Steven P. Jobs, who returned to Apple more than a decade ago when the company was on the verge of extinction,” Helft reports. “But those changes have also thrust the company into an unexpected and potentially perilous role as competitors start to cooperate with each other against Apple.”
“For all the complaining, Apple’s self-interested and quirky pursuit of innovation is not new,” Helft reports. “Time and again, it has been willing to break with technology industry standards by doing things its way, even if it ruffled feathers. ‘Apple has always marched to its own drumbeat,’ Mr. Bajarin said.”
“The company often irked suppliers and confounded pundits, for instance, when it chose to use 3.5-inch floppy disks instead of the more common 5.25-inch disks, or later, when it did away with floppy disks altogether,” Helft reports. “But now that Apple has grown from a niche player into one that leads the fastest-growing segment of the industry — mobile computing — its actions are far more consequential and the complaints have turned to grievances.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Let Apple’s road kill moan as they contemplate their own decay.
“potentially perilous rol” ?!
Yeah, that’s good reason to kill it…
Apple is too big. They make too much money. The government needs to take over the Apple board so they can axe the prices of Apples products so everyone can afford to own one. Sitting on 10’s of billions of dollars is just crazy, that money could be used better in other areas. Take over Apple and cut their wages too, I mean, come on, how much money do you really need???
That is how the new U.S. works now isn’t it?
Back in da Old Neibahood, once a business started makin’ money, Da Local Boss would start demandin’ tribute for “Protection.”
Congress is pretty much the same.
ROLL ON APPLE!
You have my vote Mr S. P. Jobs!
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Roll on I say!
@Mac Daddy:
Right on the money!!!1
And recall this?
Lead or Follow, just get out of the freakin way!
Sour grapes have turned to whine…
How do you become a consultant in anything that you never tried, used, experienced or even seen?
And I ask that question of computer pundits/reviewers and so-called anti-terrorist experts.
And meanwhile in the Gulf of Mexico oil continues to spew out of a hole a mile down on the ocean floor. I am beginning to truly understand how people get involved in the Tea Bagger movement. Get your frigging priorities right Washington!
Seems like everyone been sipping on the apple-flavored Hater-aid lately. But that is the only thing the “competition” is capable of doing now that Apple is wiping the floor with them. And this in the span of 3 years. These guys had plenty of time to clean up their act. All we need now is Apple to start making flying cars and the future we all dreamed of will be officially here. Thanks Apple.
@TowerTone
I salute you.
That is just so funny. A new proverb in the making perhaps.
Let’s not forget that while the government is investigating Apple for making people’s lives better, it’s failed to do everything possible to lessen the Gulf oil spill, has run up a monster deficit with nothing to show for it, Homeland Security is helping Saudi Arabia secure its border with Yemen while drug cartels continue to treat Arizona’s Mexican border like a game of Red Rover, and the supposed help being offered to people with mortgages is just going to enrich the banks which caused the problem in the first place.
Oh yeah, better check out Apple! Wouldn’t want anything fishy going on there!
Too bad the regulators did not scrutinize every move of the real estate and banking industry before the housing bubble.
We must crush this Apple phenomenon before people spent mortgage their homes to keep buying anything iWant!
If you can’t compete, go crying to the government.
Apple inovation is so quirky that everone wants to copy it
cheesh what a crock
The government simply looks at the history of businesses like Microsoft, Standard Oil, Hearst, BP, Exxon, etc and assumes that Apple is no different. “Apple must be evil because they are successful”
They will learn. Just because you are big, it doesn’t mean that you reached that size through immoral and unethical business practices. Some folks simply do things ‘different’!
Sadly, Apple seems to be in the minority. The vast majority of big businesses followed the other model.
People all over the world are sleeping in front of Apple stores, and fighting to give an American company their money.
We need more sensitivity…the US should be more like France, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.
Apple should be nationalized due to making too much profit.
TowerTone :
touché
I’d rather have Putin in charge than Sarah Palin. So much for idiotically politicizing this issue.
Go back to school, study economics, study political science, and burn, baby, burn those white sheets!
The government does not do this independently or automatically they don’t have the staff to do this. Specific complaints are investigated as they come in from third parties and we have the usual suspects. Just follow the lobbying trail. Thus has been happening since the days of Standard Oil.
easy solution, steve jobs runs for president and starts working on iamerica, a government with a unique focus on the end user experience complete with retina spending where you actual see what money icongress is wasting
“…government regulators are beginning to scrutinize its every move,”
So what? !!
It’s one thing to look, and quite another to make something of it.
Inquiring minds want to know how is it Apple continues to excel in a down economy. What are they doing right?
Don’t make this a bad thing.
Correction.
The sentence “the complaints have turned to grievances”, should be “the indifference has turned to bewilderment”.
Those bozos couldn’t care what happened to Apple before. They wouldn’t develop for Mac OS X, they laughed about the retail stores, they disparaged the iPhone and the iPad.
Now they’re all concerned about their existence. I wish Apple could snuff out conformists, but we’re stuck with them.
“when it chose to use 3.5-inch floppy disks instead of the more common 5.25-inch disks”
For me it was more than just the size of floppy. It was about finesse and attention to detail as rendered in the form of a motorised 3.5-inch floppy drive rather than a button that had to push based on either an on screen c:> style message or a pure guess as to when it was the right time to do so.
The real bonus was that I could be doing something else (like reading a book or watching TV) and just rely on the sound of the motorised drive automatically ejecting a disk to turn my attention back to what I had set my Mac off to do e.g., duplicate a floppy or back up the internal hard drive…
DOSsers never got this. Wonder where they are now…
Posted from my iPad using the MDN app.
I’m already starting to see this. Apple used to be the underdog. Now that they are king of the hill, there will be people who want to knock them. That seems to be a human tendency.