Comment by donkyrf
5 days ago
So according to you, a company that has about 25% of the global smartphone market, should be _legally forbidden_ from creating a tightly integrated software/hardware bundle.
Whereas, a company that has 70% of the global browser market somehow would have no way to take advantage if they had an even larger share.
I wonder how our species would survive without the unique market analysis from one-of-a-kind minds like yours.
> a company that has about 25% of the global smartphone market, should be _legally forbidden_ from creating a tightly integrated software/hardware bundle.
Absolutely not. Most of us are perfectly happy with Apple tightly integrating Safari with their hardware.
However, we're going to legally forbid them to prevent users from breaking that tight integration, because it's their device. Apple doesnt "own" the smartphone market: it provides hardware and services, and it shuts the fuck up.
Web and Apple ecosystem is not comparable. IE had quite large market share and was brought down by Chrome in quite short time. Firefox challenged IE quite effectively before that. But Windows (desktop) still enjoys quite large market share even though Google, Linux and Apple (macOS) are trying hard.
The OS lock-in is much more difficult to break than Web where the standards are openly built and made available. One aspect in favor of Google is the complexity of implementing all those standards. But that is not lock-in, rather an issue of having enough resources to implement a compliant browser.
> The OS lock-in is much more difficult to break than Web where the standards are openly built and made available.
Where have you been in the past 10 years or so? Chrome views the web as their own fiefdom, and web devs happily oblige. There are now dozens of Chrome-only non-standards that are presented as "openly built standards" and devs deride other browsers for not implementing them.
It is the decision of the other vendors to not implement the standards (for good reasons, like for e.g. privacy - but it is still the vendor's decisionand not an inherent limitation). The documentations and specifications are available for free.
In case of Windows, there is no spec. There is no possibility of implementing another Windows clone (patents limit such clones). Wine exists, but was reverse engineered with great difficulty.
1 reply →