> How is this different to how Apple (Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etc.) play the game?
At what point has coercion come in to putting a iDevice in your hand? Sure we could have that argument about advertising but Apple doesn't do a whole lot of that and the advertisements they do create are hardly designed to manipulate you - not to mention we are comparing them to the Romans here...
> This is a wonderful sentiment to approach commerce with, but it's all too easily forgotten when you're already at the top of the game. To stretch my already two-dimensional metaphor, it's at this point that empires start to stagnate, and eventually fall.
It's not a sentiment, it's the very essence of commerce. If you remove that incentive (and decline to implement an authoritarian regime to organise by force, like communism) then you have nothing but a bunch of former bureaucrats twiddling their thumbs (and likely starving to death.)
Commerce is about trading things you have for things you want: no more and no less. The problems of today are not the fault of freely organised trading by independent actors - that, instead, is the thing that brought us out of the stone age - but by the truly pain-in-the-arse implementation details of making this "system" moral and fair (define those terms however you will.) The reason I've air-quoted "system", btw, is because it is no such thing. If the apocalypse comes and the political/financial system falls, and you find yourself holed up in some basement with a stash of weaponry but no food you'll see that commerce is as natural as breathing. We have literally studied magpies and chimps making what we would call business decisions. Commerce is not evil, the system we've built around it is - I think this is the paradigm you have issue with, and it's something you ultimately need to take up with the political system.
Apple's success is owed to being good at this fundamental notion of trade, instead of gaming the system to their advantage (how many Fortune 500's would fall with a fraction of the competition Apple faces?) In order to fall one of four things would have to happen: 1) the entire system turns against them; 2) they stop being good at being Apple; 3) someone else learns how to do as they do or; 4) their actions ancillary to the product they provide me (like OPs points) become so offensive that they outweigh the benefits of being an Apple customer for a significant proportion of the consumer base. Personally, I see none of these as being particularly realistic or becoming so anytime soon.
At what point has coercion come in to putting a iDevice in your hand? Sure we could have that argument about advertising but Apple doesn't do a whole lot of that and the advertisements they do create are hardly designed to manipulate you - not to mention we are comparing them to the Romans here...
> This is a wonderful sentiment to approach commerce with, but it's all too easily forgotten when you're already at the top of the game. To stretch my already two-dimensional metaphor, it's at this point that empires start to stagnate, and eventually fall.
It's not a sentiment, it's the very essence of commerce. If you remove that incentive (and decline to implement an authoritarian regime to organise by force, like communism) then you have nothing but a bunch of former bureaucrats twiddling their thumbs (and likely starving to death.)
Commerce is about trading things you have for things you want: no more and no less. The problems of today are not the fault of freely organised trading by independent actors - that, instead, is the thing that brought us out of the stone age - but by the truly pain-in-the-arse implementation details of making this "system" moral and fair (define those terms however you will.) The reason I've air-quoted "system", btw, is because it is no such thing. If the apocalypse comes and the political/financial system falls, and you find yourself holed up in some basement with a stash of weaponry but no food you'll see that commerce is as natural as breathing. We have literally studied magpies and chimps making what we would call business decisions. Commerce is not evil, the system we've built around it is - I think this is the paradigm you have issue with, and it's something you ultimately need to take up with the political system.
Apple's success is owed to being good at this fundamental notion of trade, instead of gaming the system to their advantage (how many Fortune 500's would fall with a fraction of the competition Apple faces?) In order to fall one of four things would have to happen: 1) the entire system turns against them; 2) they stop being good at being Apple; 3) someone else learns how to do as they do or; 4) their actions ancillary to the product they provide me (like OPs points) become so offensive that they outweigh the benefits of being an Apple customer for a significant proportion of the consumer base. Personally, I see none of these as being particularly realistic or becoming so anytime soon.