Comment by sah2ed

The gp talked about a threat of a smartphone monopoly from Apple, a threat that never existed to begin with. The argument is revisionist at best.

1. Before the iPhone, Nokia enjoyed a large market share on mobile phones based on Series 40, Series 60, Maemo, etc. Essentially they had several OSes. There was also BlackBerry which had several editions of one OS but was huge as a "smartphone" for checking email.

2. Before the iPhone went on sale, Steve Job's target was 1% of all phone shipments in the original 2007 keynote:

957 mobile phones in 2006. Goal: 1% of market share = 10 million iPhones in 2008. [0]

3. Prior to the public unveil of the iPhone, Eric Schmidt who was a board member at Apple, frequently recused himself from board meetings focused on the iPhone due to the conflict of interest from Google's own mobile phone efforts. IOW, there was no monopoly threat to quelch because both companies were working almost simultaneously.

Monopolies sometimes get overused as a metaphor as in this case where the gp talked about them in the context of excess profits. My point being you don't really need to control market share to enjoy the bulk of an industry's profits as shown by Apple. Heck, even the terms market share, industry etc are proxies for determining (abuse of) market power. Their overuse/overreliance as a measure of power can be misleading when trying to reason about the effects of competition.

[0] https://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/macworld-2007-keynote-li...