Comment by jodrellblank

4 years ago

Perhaps referring to people who buy and use X's products and services as "X's customers" is unfamiliar to you, but it's in very common usage, and conveys no element of ownership:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22apple%27s%20custome...

> "You are not helping your case by making these daft comparisons."

The person I was originally replying to is the one who brought up washing machines as having general purpose computers inside them. It's not my comparison, it's me using their comparison to make a point. The point being, that because Alice bought a device that contains a microchip, doesn't entitle you to be allowed to sell software that runs on that microchip, and worsen her experience to do that. Like if Alice chooses to live in a gated community and pays someone to filter her mail, it would be obviously unreasonable to say "I object to gates, I should be allowed to post my fliers through her mailbox for free", as if that's your decision to make, not hers.

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jodrellblank

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saagarjha  4 years ago

What if Alice lives in a gated community because it has a pool and would like to receive mail that hasn’t been pre-screened?

  • jodrellblank  4 years ago

    Why would Alice buy into a gated community she doesn't want to live in, when she can buy an Android community and side-load a pool app and run her own mailserver? Android phones exist, they have app stores - multiple options - Alice could have chosen one, and not only chose something else, but likely spent more money on it as well. What kind of techno-patronising is it to pretend like Alice was too dumb to know what she was choosing, has "been robbed", and needs someone else to step in and change what she bought to "make it better for her" by making it more like the thing she could have bought and voluntarily didn't buy?

    More to the point, why should Catarina be forbidden from offering a gated community with a pool and a mail filter service, because Eve wants to send mail outside the filter system?

    Is the claim here that if you started a smartphone company with your own AppStore and sideloading, Apple would act anticompetitively and shut you down? (What would they do?) Or is the claim that it's unfair Apple offers a product other people want, which you don't want?