← Back to context

Comment by avtolik

5 days ago

Because in a case of monopoly, the people can not vote with their wallet.

Except the smartphone market isn't a monopoly.

20 years ago Europe had a thriving phone industry. Now it's just gone, and they want to blame everyone else for this, and fail to reflect on why it happened.

  • Except this has nothing to do with some monopoly on the smartphone market, but with Apple not allowing application developers to enable their users to vote with their wallets on payment methods. From the press release:

    > Under the DMA, app developers distributing their apps via Apple's App Store should be able to inform customers, free of charge, of alternative offers outside the App Store, steer them to those offers and allow them to make purchases. > > The Commission found that Apple fails to comply with this obligation. Due to a number of restrictions imposed by Apple, app developers cannot fully benefit from the advantages of alternative distribution channels outside the App Store. Similarly, consumers cannot fully benefit from alternative and cheaper offers as Apple prevents app developers from directly informing consumers of such offers. The company has failed to demonstrate that these restrictions are objectively necessary and proportionate.

    This has nothing to do with smartphones specifically, it applies equally well to anything in the AppStore ecosystem.

  • 30 years ago maybe. 20 years ago there was a European monopolist which was killed off by Microsoft alumni who sold it to Microsoft.

    • No, Sony Ericsson was way more successful than the attempts to revise history like to portray.

      The vision of what to do with the more powerful technology was also better than Nokia, though still not as good as Apple. The whole direction Nokia kept dragging Series 60 in was a dead end, almost from the very start.

      Edit to add: example of what I'm referring to with S60 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3650 . Just complete madness. Who would waste time on this?

  • I mean microsoft paid off the CEO of nokia to sink it.

    • Nokia was worthless by that point.

      Even had they run with a wild pivot to Android it would have required the strategic vision to also build an Android app store, which would have upset the various European telcos that made a few extra euros that way.

      1 reply →