> Why deprecate OpenGL and not support Vulkan, Apple? Even with DirectX, Microsoft always maintained updated OpenGL on their platform...

A platform owner is free to do whatever it feels like on their platform, provided it respects the law.

You are quite outdated about the state of OpenGL in Windows.

The only thing Microsoft did was to let ICD drivers be around for desktop applications. OpenGL is not supported on UWP or Win32 store apps, nor the Windows 10 UI compositor.

Finally, contrary to OpenGL urban myths,game consoles always favored their own 3D APIs, with the exception of OpenGL ES 1.0's failure on the PS3.

> > Why deprecate OpenGL and not support Vulkan, Apple? Even with DirectX, Microsoft always maintained updated OpenGL on their platform...

> A platform owner is free to do whatever it feels like on their platform, provided it respects the law.

The law that would come to mind here is the Sherman Antitrust Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

"The plaintiffs alleged that Microsoft abused monopoly power on Intel-based personal computers in its handling of operating system and web browser sales"

Thing is, Apple platforms aren't a monopoly at the eye of the law.

You are free to just use something else with bigger market share.

Can I just change that to

"The plaintiffs alleged that Apple abused monopoly power on A10, A10x, and A11 based smartphones and tablet computers in its handling of operating system and web browser sales"

Would that make it a monopoly?

IIRC Apple didn't sell Intel based machines when Microsoft lost this case so IIRC there was only the tiny Linux market (at the time) relative to MS. No one else sells A10, A10x, and A11 based devices so Apple does have a monopoly there by that definition.

I'm frustrated that I can't replace Apple Maps with Google Maps so that it's the integrated "map" function in iOS. I can't use real Chrome, which has a proven record of being faster and more secure than Safari, on my iPhone, even if it happened to use more battery. Frustrated can't make gmail my default mail app so clicking a mailto link goes to Apple's Mail app. I'm frustrated that it's extremely hard to run GPLed software on iOS (requires $99 a year and self-signing or free and resigning every week). No Kodi. No EMUs.

I would love to see Apple change their polices there.

“Monopoly” is a term which can only be used in the context of a market. A market is defined only by the demand for some specific utility. iOS devices do not form their own market as the utility they provide is also provided by other products.

Normally I'd just agree, but... That doesn't jive with the "intel-based" part of the original version, though. A desktop is a desktop, and while there is a type of compatibility that matters to most users it's not the processor. So why is that use fair but not the other?

Because the part quoted there is just one line that doesn't fully represent the case or the world in which it was set. At the time, there was no significant consumer market share for non-Intel-based computers. Microsoft had a monopoly on the personal computer operating system market. Saying that Apple has a monopoly on their own products isn't meaningful.

No, because you fail to understand law.

Apple does not have a monopoly regardless how many times you type the word, and come up with your own definitions.

I agree. On a side note, wouldn't that somewhat mean that 11billion fine on Google is not justified.

> with the exception of OpenGL ES 1.0's failure on the PS3.

Got a source on that one? I did plenty of work on the PS3 and never heard anyone complaining about that(the SPUs on the other hand, not many people were ready for massive vectorization).

Also X360 was DirectX based, I knew plenty of PC engines that ported straight over(although with a ton of pain when they realized they couldn't call malloc all over the place).

The failure was not technical, rather that most developers ignored it and rather used Phyre Engine or libGCM.

As for a source, here is one from Sandstorm developers.

https://sandstormgames.ca/2011/07/22/debug-playstation3/

<quote>

At one point, Sony was asking developers whether they would be interested in having PSGL conform to the OpenGL ES 2.0 specs (link here). This has unfortunately never happened however, as developers seem to have mostly preferred to go with libGCM as their main graphics API of choice on PS3. This has meant that the development environment has started becoming more libGCM-centric over the years with PSGL eventually becoming a second-class citizen – in fact, new features like 3D stereo mode is not even possible unless you are using libGCM directly.

</quote>

I assume as former PS3 dev you also have access to the GLESTutorial07_Arnaud_Remi_PSGL.pdf done at GDC 2006, otherwise you can get it from https://tinyurl.com/yajn75h2.

I think he meant that few ever used OpenGL on PS3, not that everyone had been complaining about it. I, for one, have not heard of any AAA game using it though some indies might have.

Apple is not a monopoly, even google is not a monopoly. facebook is. Fb is either buying or using its reach to enter into other markets. Messaging, videos (youtube), stories (snapchat), crowd sourcing (gofundme), marketplace (offerup). In all these it is using its existing dominance in one market to enter into other which is classical case of antitrust.

Google has an extremely blatant monopoly in search. That has been the case for over a decade now.

The competitors to Google, outside of a few markets like Russia and China, are trivial at best.

Google's search competitors are so weak, all they've collectively done is lose market share for 20 years. The social competitors to Facebook - Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, etc. - are no more threatening to FB's monopoly than DuckDuckGo and Bing are to Google's search monopoly.

When companies like Google and Facebook have monopolies, what they do in response is lie: they claim competition is everywhere. Microsoft used that lying tactic as well. They pretend they're not really in the search space specifically, they're an ad company in general, and they're only a small N% of the whole global ad market. So Google likes to lie and pretend they compete with every input box on the Web, and every ad served anywhere on earth; naturally their share of all text input box usage is merely 1%.

> Google has an extremely blatant monopoly in search

Tough thing is it grew to a position of dominance, on the user side, organically. (On the ad side, the story is more complicated.) Facebook grew on both sides by gobbling up potential competition, e.g. Instagram, WhatsApp, et cetera.

I agree. I regard Google search as one of the greatest technological accomplishments in world history. The service it has been to humanity can't be overstated. It wasn't just slightly better, it was radically better in every way. It was faster, it produced better results, it even had greater integrity (less clutter & junk, less abusive ad approach by not mixing results & ads, etc).

A dominant, extreme majority market position by itself isn't valid justification to break a company up or apply anti-trust (in the US). Monopolies are of course not illegal in the US. Google's search product remains superior and it's unlikely to be directly, seriously challenged by a threatening competitor. It's the change in integrity that might take them down. Call it greed. The greed eats the ecosystem, pushes for a greater share of the pot, then the ecosystem cries foul to regulators, identical to Microsoft's mistakes derived from greed. If a monopoly platform can't control itself properly - in terms of human nature, it's probably extremely difficult to restrain that level of economic power while existing in a low feedback, low consequence bubble - then the authorities will probably step in and do it. When it comes to monopolies, you can eat this, maybe you can eat this and that, you can't eat this and that and that and that and that. It's pretty much that simple, you control yourself or eventually the guys with the guns will do it for you (if only out of concerns for preserving their own power).

I sincerely believe that with a little shoe polish, a little more sincere effort into information retrieval mathematics, and better marketing, DuckDuckGo would be a superior search product.

Currently I use DuckDuckGo for probably 85% of searches. There are specific search cases that don’t work well, and specific types of automatic categorization and presentation (e.g. sports scores, rich location data) that Google is well ahead on.

But in many mundane searches, the result quality is indistinguishable and the lack of personalized tracking would break any ties strongly in DuckDuckGo’s favor, so strongly that it’s obviously worth it to split searches between two different engines on a case by case basis.

And in fact, I like some things about DuckDuckGo better, particularly I like the visual experience of its Open Street Maps results better. It’s not as information rich as a Google Maps result, but Google Maps is visually too cluttered and often suffers performance issues that a lower-tech maps service doesn’t. (DuckDuckGo also lets you select from a few choices for the maps backend, including Google Maps).

Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure Google will remain far ahead as the search product leader.

I only mean that in terms of the implementation and actual user experience, DuckDuckGo doesn’t have far to go before it would be entirely a substitute product that completely replaces an average search experience on Google.

(I’m speaking as someone who had worked on all types of personalization features for an Alexa top 400 site’s product search engine — so I have a lot of work experience informing my opinion that the actual distance, in terms of the investment to reproduce feature parity, between DuckDuckGo and Google is not that high.)

Google’s original efforts to create internet search were amazing. But now the underlying search tech is totally a commodity, including most of the fancier machine learning and information retrieval features. It’s why they have to integrate advertising so tightly to it. Search features alone don’t differentiate it as a product anymore.

I do hope a service like DuckDuckGo invests in that last 10% of the squirrly little extra features it needs to provide to seriously compete for overall market share.

I wish DDG would include a button in the search results that says "Search in Google instead".

That way, I would actually use DDG as my main search engine because it would be easy to resort to Google in specific cases.

Check out Bangs on DDG [1]. Just insert "!g" into your search text and it automatically redirects your search to Google. It works for thousands of other websites too. (Wikipedia's !w is one I use all the time)

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Yeah, I know about bangs, but on mobile they are cumbersome to use: I have to tap my screen 7 times to change from DDG to Google:

    1. tap DDG search bar
    2. tap space
    3. tap shift key
    4. tap "!"
    5. tap shift key
    6. tap "g"
    7. tap enter key

If DDG included a simple button, it would be 1 tap. Of course, I can't blame them for not linking to Google, but this way I will stick with Google.

Wouldn't it be amazing to create a rent-seeking feeder website similar to e.g. Expedia, Priceline, Hipmunk, Orbitz, etc., that sits on top of data provided by other providers (in those example cases, data from airlines and so on, but in the search engine case, data about the characteristics of search results).

Then a user can go to my site at www.mycashcow.com or something and type in a query, which behind the scenes farms out queries to other search engines, gets characteristics about their results and predicts which of the search engines you would most prefer for this particular query, and then navigates you to that search engine's results page.

This way you always use one portal to search, and to the extent that you approve of its underlying prediction model, it automatically routes you to your preferred search engine for a given task, without needing to open a different tab or even click a button.

Expedia-like sites have been able to do this because by acting as aggregators, they solved a general search traffic problem for a fractured set of service providers (hotels, airlines, etc), which in some cases have to make some of the data publicly available. So the providers could not easily avoid a race-to-the-bottom commodity effect or avoid paying the aggregator sites for preferred placement. Seamless is doing this now with local food delivery.

We would get destroyed by Google if we tried this though, because then it would mean Google traffic would depend on Google actually functioning as a quality search engine, rather than happening to be a monopoly search engine (good quality, sure, but still monopoly) and reaping benefits in the form of advertising integration. Advertising would only pay for Google ads if the traffic driven to Google from www.mycashcow.com was in line with what they wanted, which would incentivize Google to either pay me to rank them higher, or do things like ceasing to track users because that would make them competitive with what users like about DuckDuckGo.

Since Google could sue me so hard regarding whether I am allowed to farm out a "pre-query" to their search engine, analyze "their" search results data, and recommend if a user would prefer it to the other options, I don't think this business could get off the ground unless it was created with a pre-arranged collusion with Google from the start.

Why would it be illegal to combine data from different sources? As a user, I'm doing this all the time. So why would it be different if a machine does it for me?

Of course, if somebody is making money off of it (mycashcow.com in your example), then it might be a different story.

It's better to think of Search as less of a historic plain text input field on a landing page, and instead to open it up to where people discover new ideas, products, and opportunities. Facebook and Amazon are enormous in this model. Amazon so much so that WPP and other advertising giants are less afraid of Google & Facebook, and instead incredibly terrified at what Amazon has and where Amazon is going.

But is it the fault of Google their competitors are weak? Should we now reward creating a better product? You can use whatever search engine you want and Bing is actually two less charcters it just sucks so no one uses. That is not the fault of Google is it?

Look at browsers and Google has most of the market even though you have to download to get when the PC comes with MS browser. Why?

Google came late to search as well as browsers and simply won because of a much better product that continue to improve far faster than competitors. Why on Earth would we penalize this?

Being a monopoly is fine. The problem starts when a company abuses it's monopoly power.

It doesn't make any sense to say a company that has achieved monopoly status can abuse its power as long as they acquired their monopoly legitimately.

> Being a monopoly is fine. The problem starts when a company abuses it's monopoly power.

This is dangerously incorrect. A market economy requires competition to function correctly. Any monopoly — but especially one in a major market — is a hazard to the health of the broader economy and the society that depends upon it.

See: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/amazons-antitrust-par...

> The long-term interests of consumers include product quality, variety, and innovation—factors best promoted through both a robust competitive process and open markets. By contrast, allowing a highly concentrated market structure to persist endangers these long-term interests, since firms in uncompetitive markets need not compete to improve old products or tinker to create news ones.

I'm talking legally and from a US perspective.

It seems to be a little known fact in Silicon Valley that you can not buy Apple products and do all your computing just fine.

Wait, what? You said Facebook is a monopoly, but just listed competitors in every single area Facebook is in.

Those are the competitors in spaces that facebook is currently invading, not its core

It's been like this with every big tech company though;

Microsoft had (has?) a monopoly on the desktop OS (the only OS that mattered back then), before it diversified.

Google had (has?) a monopoly on search before it diversified.

Amazon has a monopoly on e-commerce, and is just now starting to really diversify.

Apple is the only exception-- they aren't really a "software" company though.

Claiming that Facebook should be broken up but not other big-tech companies isn't taking this into account.

We should break up most of them. Conglomerates and market concentration are bad for innovation and competition in general.

Nope! What we should break is the fingers of the idiot users that foist this garbage onto the rest of us.

It's hardly Big Company's fault that one non-employee X of Big Company forces another non-employee Y of Big Company to use something. It's X who is instigating it.

Things are early. IMO we should just see what happens. Tech is changing fast enough that all of this concern could be moot in 10 years. And I say that as someone who thinks Facebook (and social media, in general) is a cancer on our species.

Things can change quickly, you're right, but if the long-term secular trend is towards market concentration, then merely putting one giant monopoly in the place of another doesn't provide the kind of "change" we need for market competition to spur innovation and serve society.

> Google had (has?) a monopoly on search before it diversified.

Search is not Google's product.

Just wait until the world realizes email still works.

And IRC!

Yeah there are competitors and always will be. Point is does fb use its monopoly in one area to enter into another? Just being monopoly is not illegal.

Correction - Google is not a monopoly in the US, China, Russia and a few others. It's a monopoly in most of Europe and I think most Asian countries, too.

Anti-competitive tactics are only illegal for companies with monopoly positions. Google is far closer to that than Apple for phone operating systems, and would have a monopoly except for... Apple. Apple has something like 5-15% of the global phone market, which is nowhere near a monopoly, obviously.

Unlike 1990s Microsoft, Apple is far from a monopoly in terms of market share. And Apple doesn't take money off browser-based transactions, so that's a flawed analogy.

It seems it is a bigger chunk of the economy than Microsoft was in the 1990s

Microsoft didn't take 30% of Windows based transactions. Can you imagine what would've happened if they had tried?

What does that have to do with its lack of support for a particular API being anti-competitive? On the contrary, it’s giving Android (or other future mobile platforms) a vector to distinguish itself.

It's a tactic to artificially reinforce the position of a propreitary API in the market (by killing support for its competitors)

They’re not selling an API, and if (built in) support on virtually all desktops and about half of mobile devices in the US (higher elsewhere in the world) aren’t enough to keep Vulkan alive and well I’d be pretty shocked.

Vulkan wasn’t around when Metal started. Is it really their responsibility to kill their pre-existing API because an open one finally showed up?

> Is it really their responsibility to kill their pre-existing API because an open one finally showed up?

Well... Yes. If they want to do best by their users.

They also didn’t collect the payment and host the binaries for unlimited volumes of $0.99 shovelware.

It's really difficult for some people to understand that there is incredible value provided by retailers. And that there is a reason why manufacturers have historically not been vertically integrated with retailers.

They would've been welcome to do that, if they didn't have a monopoly. There are different rules if you have a monopoly.

Do you think the majority of Apple's, Google's, Microsoft's etc. users are not also outside of the US?? US Population is 325 MM vs 7300 MM outside the US

You did say "in the 1990's", but for the record, these days MS does take 30% in the Windows app store.

Right? They're pretending Apple just came up with this idea, but they basically copied the model from Xbox Live, PSN, and Steam.

They realized that by being the curators of the platform, they could charge developers for access to it.