Daniel Lyons, aka as Fake Steve Jobs,has raised the ire of the Apple community by suggesting that Apple and its CEO are just one step removed from being equivalent to Microsoft. Of course, that one step is a big one – Apple still does not have a monopoly like Windows or Office that is worh $10billion++ per year. Now Daniel cites the fact that Apple is dominant in such ecosystems as iTunes which sells more music than Wal Mart, iPod which appears to be the one Apple true monopoly in music players, and iPhone which might be a monopoly in $400 or more mobile phones.
So as you can see, this party does not agree with the view that Apple and Steve Jobs are monopolists on the scale of Bill Gates and the ruthless Redmondians. However, Steve may very well have the same hubris as Bill Gates. After all he is selling his “wonderful” MacOS in hardware units that cost 4 times as much as their PC hardware equivalents. And the new iPhone app store does seem to be taking large cuts and making some rather arbitrary decisions on who gets in and who is out. One notable – Adobe Flash is still software non-grata on the iPhone for God-and-Steve-Jobs-only-know what reason.
So, is Steve Jobs as bad a monopolist as Bill Gates? Nope, but he certainly is a wannabee.