The thing is Apple's share of the phone market in the EU isn't all that great (I gather it's less than 25%). Meanwhile Google has > 80% of the EU search market.
You can't exploit a monopoly if you don't have one to begin with.
It's about time the idea of "monopoly" is extended beyond mere market share. With the amount of mobile profits Apple is raking in (70%? 80%?) I'd argue that they have FAR more market power in mobile than all the other players combined.
If they had dominant share, and this behavior and massive profit?
Yeah, that's borked up for sure and people are being over exploited.
But they don't have that dominant share, meaning their path is a clear choice, and it's clearly competing with others who operate differently.
The thing is, Apple sells a managed experience. Apple also adds a lot of value, and they ask for that in their pricing, and the managed experience means they can command high margins for the whole solution.
As much as people don't like that, it's a perfectly viable market offering.
That it's not getting dominant share means the other ways of doing things are competing nicely.
As for who makes money and who does not, that's a business problem.
The general purpose market offerings tend to race to the bottom quickly. Margins are thin, share high.
Apple doesn't want to do that, instead offering a different vision, and it's high margins are worth it.
Nobody is trapped with Apple. They have lots of alternatives to choose from.
That means people like Apple, and will pay for the value Apple adds too.
Capitalizing the company like that means they have funded not only the current products, but the development and means for future ones. And Apple makes good products that target some very specific niches.
Other players can and should add value and start asking for it like Apple has for a very long time now.
Heck, they started that with the Apple ][ computer. Given it's overall capability, it was priced pretty high relative to others, but it was also a very high value package. That machine ran from what? late 70's to mid 90's?
Worth it.
Share matters.
Apple has made a business doing niche, high value, high margin products. They get to do that.
They are not a monopoly, and that's why they get to do that.
> It's about time the idea of "monopoly" is extended beyond mere market share.
I don't get the reasoning here. It seems to go something like this:
- "monopoly" is bad
- Apple is bad
- Therefore, whatever Apple is doing, we should call that a monopoly. They're both bad, and all bad things are the same thing.
We have monopoly-suppressive legislation because we're afraid that monopolies will do certain things. If you want to extend the sense of "monopoly", as used in monopoly-suppressive legislation, you need to show (or, heck, at least claim) that your new "monopolies" pose the same risks as the old monopolies. If it's just that you don't like the new things, and you want to see them suppressed in the same way that monopolies are suppressed, say that instead. We can send people to jail for rape, and we can send people to jail for vandalism, but in order to jail people for vandalism we don't need to say that vandalism is actually a type of rape.
You can't exploit a monopoly if you don't have one to begin with.