It's honestly weird to me how much work they put into their hissy fits. It's not like their bottom line or their stock price would notice it when they would just open up their OS a bit more.
>It's not like their bottom line or their stock price would notice it when they would just open up their OS a bit more.
Present day Apple is run by bean counters and lawyers and their job is to be paranoid about anything that threatens Apple's bottom line at all costs, and regulation that force them to allow alternate stores are their biggest threat right now since a lot of their income comes from the App store fees and without the lock in they have no moat since smartphones are a commodity now.
Didn't Jobs say something along the lines of "But when companies get big, they sometimes lose their way and start to value the wrong things. They start to value the people who create the process, rather than the people who get things done. In a big company, politics can get in the way of what’s really important—great work. In the end, companies don’t die because of this. They die because they stop innovating."
Jobs said many things, some right, some wrong (dismissing PC games and the OpenGL API as a fad leading to Macs low market share during the PC wars). The difference is he said those things when Apple was still a start-up or a small tightly run ship with the DNA from NeXT.
Apple of today is a multi domain multi national behemoth with 20x-50x the workforce of back then. What sayings apply to start-ups don't apply any more to largest corporations in the world.
What he said decades ago is no longer relevant to the Apple of today.
It's also pretty weird for them to have integrated it so hard in the first place given the Microsoft monopoly case about Internet Explorer in the 90s.
I'm not even sure why they even bothered to create Safari — even though today it happens to be something I prefer over Chrome, there's also still Firefox — and unless I can answer that, I can't tell why they might care about this.
Money that goes into this is money that doesn't go into the shareholders pockets or into growing Apple. It's like asking Whatsapp to allow third party clients or expose their API. Makes tech nerd sense but not business sense.
At the of the day, tech nerd sense is working your socks off on an OSS that companies get to use for free with 0 contribution to the ecosystem while accepting underpaid tech jobs. Business sense is decreasing costs and increasing revenue in the long term
