Apple is just Microsoft with better marketing

Re:Apple is just Microsoft with better marketing by yardie on Friday April 30, 2010 @10:41AM (#1308263)

This guy must be really young because either he's delusional or we read 2 different headlines in '00.

For Apple to be like Microsoft it would have to take a standardized language (like HTML, Javascript, or Java), fork it so it is unreadable by the original, then use it's monopoly so that no one else can create a competitor.

Here is a rundown of this MS behavior:

MS-DOS vs. PC-DOS

J# vs Java

IE6 vs HTML4

MS JS vs javascript

Now when Apple forks Flash and decides that is the only Flash that will be available on iPhoneOS then they will have become Microsoft.

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Re:Apple is just Microsoft with better marketing by sgoraya on Friday April 30, 2010 @12:09PM (#1308545)

"fork it so it is unreadable by the original, then use it's monopoly so that no one else can create a competitor."

Although MS may fork something, it does not force you to use their proprietary language - In the examples above, you can still use the original language...the choice remains yours.

I might be biased since I've basically only developed on Windows (Visual Studio, code warrior, borland, etc.), but in the big scheme of things, MS has been more open, had more alternatives and options and better developer support than Apple...IMHO.

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Re:Apple is just Microsoft with better marketing by yardie on Friday April 30, 2010 @12:13PM (#1308559)

When you are writing for a platform that controls 98% of the market its less a choice and more a mandate.

As anyone that has had to write parallel code in HTML/CSS/JS for IE vs every other browser your choices are: do it our way.

MS was only open in their willingness to assimilate other good technologies, and then lock everyone else out once they had enough influence.

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Re:Apple is just Microsoft with better marketing by lazugod on Friday April 30, 2010 @07:32PM (#1309740)

Why doesn't Apple write their own Flash runtime? They did so for PDF on the Mac.

Or was "Thoughts on Flash" intended to be Jobs's pitch for Core Animation?

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Re:Apple is just Microsoft with better marketing by yardie on Saturday May 01, 2010 @05:55AM (#1310365)

They can't. No one can.

There are open source alternatives like Gnash but they are reverse-engineered runtimes. And like all RE'd apps they are at the mercy of Adobe. It already has problems with Flash 10. This is why Jobs argument is so valid. Anyone can write a swf file but it's restricted to running on Adobe's Flash runtime.

PDF is a special case. I still have an Acrobat 1.0 disk in storage with my Photoshop 3.1 floppies, somewhere. Adobe was giving it away at that point. They also gave licenses to PDFs. Only one company took the offer, Next. Apple bought Next and inherited that license from '93.

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