The latest from Fake Steve on this piece: http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/04/please-stop-thinking-about-....

Fake Steve raises an interesting point about how close John Gruber and Apple are.

>"...we leaked the Flash essay to our Chief Apologist John Gruber and told him to start whipping up some buzz on Twitter about it, and he followed orders [http://twitter.com/gruber/status/12988151829]."

Consider too that Steve Jobs replied to an email asking about the restriction of apps to C* with a link to a Gruber post [http://www.taoeffect.com/blog/2010/04/steve-jobs-response-on...].

Oh man, I almost spit my tea out laughing at that. Wow.

I'd argue that the real Steve Jobs is Bill Gates, lately. Maybe Monopolies (essentially) do that to people.

Apple do not have a Monopoly, unless you use a diseased meaning of the word Monopoly to mean devices produced by Apple. In that case, almost every company has a monopoly.

At a certain point, if you execute so much better than the competition and set yourself up differently (controlling and innovating in hardware too) and you maintain total control of your platform, you can dominate in the market to such an extent that you have a virtual monopoly.

Yes, but Apple do not have a monopoly in smartphones or computers. Maybe, just maybe you could say they have significant market dominance of mp3 player market, but who cares about that.

How is it so different? Microsoft at least did not control the hardware. Apple has always been worse than Microsoft in that respect - they even wanted to control the printer at one point! The only difference now is that for some reason its working for them now and iPhone is incredibly popular. But they're much more monopolistic than Microsoft ever was, and they always have been, and I would imagine they always will be.