Apple: The New Microsoft
Well, that didn't take long. — In a decade, Apple (AAPL) has gone from niche-market roadkill to a company whose growing dominance and competitive tactics in a booming market are thrilling investors, angering competitors, and drawing regulatory scrutiny.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third time in two years the business press has circled Apple's hard edges: Forbes asked about a "worm in the Apple" in August 2007, Newsweek followed with "One Bad Apple" in September 2008, and both probed the same question — whether Apple's grip on its own platform turns partners into captives. What separates this piece from those is scale and confirmation: by late August 2009 the App Store is generating rumored revenue around $200M monthly per AdMob-based estimates (still unconfirmed), Snow Leopard has begun shipping, and a September 9 rock-and-roll iPod event at Yerba Buena Center is locked in.
The Microsoft label also needs qualifying — in May, Business Insider documented Microsoft "kicking Apple's butt in the living room", so Apple's dominance is category-specific, not total. But the two claims this report confirms — competitors angered and regulatory scrutiny drawn — plus the iStat incident four days earlier, where Apple made a shipping app drop its new features, give the analogy real substance rather than rhetorical convenience.
First-order effects
- Apple now operates under confirmed regulatory scrutiny of its growing dominance and competitive tactics — the exact dynamic that defined Microsoft at its peak — while developers absorb its gatekeeping directly, as iStat did on August 27 when forced to ship an update stripped of its new features.
Second-order effects
- Angered competitors gain an incentive to convert their grievances into regulator ammunition, turning app-store rejections and platform lock-ins into antitrust case material.
- If the reported end of iPhone exclusivity on U.S. carriers other than AT&T materializes within a year — currently only a rumor, not a confirmed deal — U.S. smartphone distribution resets and every carrier renegotiates from scratch.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the contested terrain shifts from individual products to the platform itself: app approval, hardware-software integration, and carrier deals become what regulators and rivals audit, making vertical integration — long Apple's differentiator — the structure under examination.
The trend: Consumer computing is consolidating around vertically integrated platforms whose gatekeeper power, once a competitive advantage, is becoming the target of rival complaints and regulatory review — the arc that turned Microsoft into "Microsoft."