You Do Not Live in Apple’s World
All it takes is some bedtime reading of Epic’s 365-page findings document to see just how aggressive Apple executives have gotten in carrying out Steve Jobs ’ 2010 vision to, as the finding document quotes him, “tie all our products together so we further lock customers into our ecosystem.”
“Getting customers using our stores (iTunes, App and iBookstore) is one of the best things we can do to get people hooked to the ecosystem,” Eddy Cue, Apple senior vice president of internet software and services, wrote in an email in 2013 that was included in the finding document. “Who leaves Apple products once they’ve bought apps, music and movies!”
Those of us living with multiple Apple gadgets know the garden is pretty darn nice. We’re suffering no more than that person seated in first class next to the lavatory. But are we missing out? More here.
It would be foolish to suggest that Apple is an underdog in the tech world. It would be blinkered to suggest that Apple is not incredibly powerful and possibly the single most important company in the world today, but the continual complaints about the walled garden and Apple's control over how consumers spend their money misses out the sheer power of the other tech giants.
I am in the walled garden, of that there is no doubt, and that is proven because I use a new MacBook Air, an iPhone 11 Pro, a new iPad Air and an Apple Watch Series 6. Oh, and AirPods Pro, an Apple Pencil, Apple One and an older Apple TV. It's all Apple for me, or is it?
For work I have to use the company issued MICROSOFT Windows laptop. For email it's MICROSOFT Outlook. Spreadsheets have to be created in MICROSOFT Excel, documents in MICROSOFT Word, instant messaging and group chats in MICROSOFT Teams. And MICROSOFT Exchange is there in the background doing so many other things.
It may be different in other countries, but in the UK Microsoft dominates business computing in terms of operating systems and software, and that bind has never been broken. It is also true that when I create documents in Pages or Spreadsheets in Numbers on my Mac I still have to export them to MICROSOFT formats for most people to be able to easily open them and access the content. It is even the case that my freelance work for a Mac magazine has to be uploaded in MICROSOFT Word format.
If I want to find anything on the web and am looking for accuracy and speed I will of course use GOOGLE. For navigation GOOGLE Maps is getting more ubiquitous than ever and of course then there is the dominant YouTube which is owned by GOOGLE.
It could be argued that Apple would be nowhere near where the brand is today without some form of manipulation to compete with the big boys.
You can argue that Apple is aggressive, you can quite rightly say that the company verges on forcing consumers to use some of its products if they need to use another Apple product, but please don't tell me that I am living in Apple's world. And if I am living in Apple's world for personal computing tasks at least that is by choice, I don't get to choose what I use for work and arguably for search either.