Apple dismisses Microsoft monopoly comparisons
A week after finding itself at the business end of a landmark lawsuit from the United States Department of Justice, Apple is staunchly denying any parallels between itself and Microsoft in the 1990s. It’s a comparison into which the U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland leaned heavily in last week’s filing.
While portions of the United States v. Microsoft Corp. were partially overturned, the Windows maker was ultimately required to modify certain business practices deemed monopolistic by the government. Garland and the 16 state attorneys general that participated in the Apple suit are no doubt seeking a similar outcome to curtail practices it believes amount to an unfair advantage for the $2.65 trillion company.
“In 1998, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs criticized Microsoft’s monopoly and ‘dirty tactics’ in operating systems to target Apple, which prompted the company ‘to go to the Department of Justice’ in hopes of getting Microsoft ‘to play fair,’” the suit notes, heavily implying hypocrisy on Apple’s part. “But even at that time, Apple did not face the same types of restrictions it imposes on third parties today; Apple users could use their iPod with a Windows computer, and Microsoft did not charge Apple a 30% fee for each song downloaded from Apple’s iTunes store. Similarly, when Apple brought the iPhone to market in 2007, it benefited from competition among component makers and wireless carriers.”
For its part, Apple cites global iPhone numbers that are nowhere approaching the 90+% market share Windows enjoyed prior to the turn of the millennium. Lawsuits like this are a rare opportunity to see a large corporation bragging about how few devices they’ve sold relative to the broader market. Indeed, with numbers hovering around 20% globally, it’s difficult to make the case that the company is dominating the competition the way Microsoft did a quarter-century ago.
