Apple buys chips from Samsung.

Or at least they used to - I guess lately they are strictly reliant on TSMC?

https://wccftech.com/samsung-aiming-high-apple-a13-next-year...

https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/01/23/apple-boosts-chip-...

This is incorrect. Apple doesn't buy chips from Samsung or TSMC. Apple orders the chips to be manufactured by them. The chip design is made by Apple on their own.

Buying a chip from someone (i.e., purchasing rights to use an existing chip design made by someone) vs. ordering your own chip to be manufactured by someone are two different things.

It's like, we don't say that Apple just bought phones from Foxconn, they simply acted as a manufacturer.

Sure, my point is just that it's not insane to give money to another arm (pardon the pun) of a company you happen to be competing with, and in fact it happens all the time.

Apple still buys flash (I think) and sdram from Samsung.

Because their hosting companies aren't your competitor. Just because they have the same general brand name slapped on the label doesn't mean they are one company. At the same time, even if it were a competitor: does it matter? Your service superiority isn't based on whose computers it runs on, as long as it runs well.

Say it's about the money: then yes, you could in theory have a problem with that, but one way or the other you'll have a problem: if you work at zoom and someone has an xbox, uses windows or uses office you're still tied to that 'competitor'. It seems to me that the competitor is just that specific element (Teams, Skype) and not everything that happens to be close to me. But I'm no MBA and my perspective is probably not the most profitable one.

For starters, because Zoom's decision to go with either of those companies as a cloud supplier isn't going to have any impact on their competition as a conferencing service provider. It's not like Microsoft is going to go broke tomorrow and cancel teams if Zoom goes to Oracle.

More fundamentally because business is cooperative and not like a war, but like a game with many repetitions. So working with your competitors can be mutually beneficial. Business is not a zero-sum game, it's not like two villages in the walking dead going at each other.

Netflix and Spotify don't seem to have any problems. Cloud hosting is also at least a semi-important part of these businesses. I'm sure the contracts prevent outright abuse of the relationship, but more than that, if a cloud provider took advantage of that relationship, no one would host their again.

In a world of multinational conglomerates, it’s very common for a business to have a supplier that is owned by the owner of a competitor in a different line of business.