This is just basic business sense -- you don't go showing off your crown jewels to any company without lots and lots of NDAs and binding agreements in place first, unless you have some kind of hook in there to keep it rooted with you. And even then, just don't do it! This was the lesson learned by US chip manufacturers back in the 70s and 80s when competing against Japan -- it's no different with software. In fact, it's worse for software because there are less protections available.

Right. The problem is, when you're dealing with Apple, the NDAs and agreements are all theirs and you have no leverage. I agree with you. Don't.

Every meeting is a negotiation, and NDAs must be bidirectionally signed. You do have leverage: it's your IP.

What would have been a better outcome? Continuing to make customers pay for the feature?

Buying the company? If so, what about the competing companies that offer this functionality? Apple obviously felt it would be easier/cheaper to build than buy.

Buying the company (or a competitor) would have been fair: it would have felt like “the market has spoken” and a winner was picked. Building anew after playing it cool feels very “Pirates of Silicon Valley”.

This said, single-platform feature apps like this are always at risk from this sort of thing.

They could have bought the company if necessary. Frankly it just wasn't worth buying. That is the market speaking. The market said it was better to develop the thing in house.

And before Steve Jobs came back, Apple would buy third-party utilities to incorporate into MacOS (System 7.5 WindowShade, MenuClock, Hierarchical Apple Menu were all third-party acquisitions)

Apple still buys companies all the time. Perhaps not always well-known app developers, but certainly a lot of them. (Shazam is one from recent memory, as was Siri.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

Note that nearly all of these occurred after Steve Jobs’ return and continued apace after his death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

This makes me believe that if Apple is building their own rather than buying, perhaps there’s not a whole lot of innovation that the app developer created that wasn’t trivially replaceable.

They still acquire when they need the talent, but the utilities I listed were absolutely trivial (printing the time in the menu bar?) and Apple could have easily just replicated them

Whenever someone mentions how much better/different it was under Steve Jobs reign it's always a sign that the comment is 100% wrong.

Especially since all of the Apple senior leadership team were still there making the same decisions as when Jobs was CEO.

I think the commenter is actually stating that Apple was better on this front in the era when Steve Jobs wasn't able kind. As in, the Gil Amelio and the like era.

Can't seem to be able to edit but "able kind" was meant as "around".

> [...] Apple extended interest and kindness towards them and then copied their products. It's just kind of cruel.

No it isn't.

That is capitalism and cut-throat business. These guys were foolish for getting so close to Apple when Apple could literally destroy their entire business by adding a single feature.

Protip: If your business is defined by a single feature, your strategy sucks.

It's not cruel, but it is cut-throat? Isn't cut-throat cruel? You're using a different word to say the same thing.

You are missing my point. As you noted, it is in fact capitalism and it is in fact cut throat. Yet it is simultaneously cruel and misguided. There is nothing inherent in capitalism that says it must be cruel and cut-tnroat. The more it is used in a cruel way, however, the more people will distrust it and the more we are at risk of losing it.