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A comment on Herd Mentality.

Re:Herd Mentality by jballanc on Friday October 23, 2009 @06:56PM (#899781)
Gruber doesn't quite go all the way here, but it's important to note that no company can operate in a vacuum. However, what's important, vitally important, is that you don't operate such that one of your key suppliers is a monopoly! Just look at Apple's suppliers: Intel? They better keep up with AMD or else Apple will do to them what they did to IBM. Flash memory providers? Apple plays so many of them off each other that you can tell when a new Apple product is about to launch just by watching the market price of Flash. Graphics? Apple's been bouncing between nVidia and ATI like nobody's business...

...so really, it's not so much about hardware vs software vs hardware+software. It's that the smart businessperson doesn't knowingly make a deal with a monopoly.

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Re:Herd Mentality by gaius on Saturday October 24, 2009 @03:39AM (#900244)
It's that the smart businessperson doesn't knowingly make a deal with a monopoly.

I see what you're saying, but hasn't nearly every Apple customer effectively done that? A datacentre could maybe rip out Xserves and replace them with equivalent 1U boxes running some generic Unix apps (e.g. Tomcat) but anyone who has developed on the Mac platform is beholden to Apple.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, and not that there is an economic way to stay completely platform agnostic, but it does contradict what you say.

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Re:Herd Mentality by euccastro on Saturday October 24, 2009 @03:53AM (#900255)
It doesn't contradict it. He talks about Apple, you talk about Apple's customers. Thinking of it from the company's position, other's monopolies are bad for you, not necessarily your monopolistic advantages.
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Re:Herd Mentality by jballanc on Saturday October 24, 2009 @05:30AM (#900303)
Yes, and as for developers, they're developing for a market (i.e. Apple isn't supplying materials, just opportunity). It's sort of like how Detroit was developing for the petroleum market. The idea there, though, is that in developing for a market, you should have general domain abilities that can span markets. In other words, if you're an Apple developer, you depend on the Apple market to sell your product, but you should be able to take your development ability and develop for Windows or Linux should the Apple market collapse.

Obviously, it's not guaranteed that you'll be that smart. Detroit should have been smart enough to take their expertise in developing for the petroleum market and transfer it to success in the alternative energy market. But it's still not as bad as having a key component of your product be supplied by a monopoly (just ask your local jeweler).

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