Apple CEO Steve Jobs

“This don’t-be-evil mantra. It’s bullshit.” August 17, 2010
— Steve Jobs, on Google’s informal slogan

Jason Farbman wrote (I’ll abridge and edit slightly): “WALL STREET has called the end of an era and the beginning of the next one,” proclaimed the New York Times in late May. Apple Computer, widely perceived to be on its financial deathbed as recently as the late 1990s, had become the most valuable tech company in the world, with total outstanding stock worth $222.12 billion (outpacing Exxon).

So how was this possible when a decade ago the US economy was not expanding?

As one executive put it, summarizing the attitude of the rest: “Microsoft depends more on maintaining the status quo, while Apple is in a constant battle to one-up itself and create something new.”  The narrative was simple, and as old as the free market itself: Apple, down to its last dime, lived up to its slogan to “think different,” worked hard and pulled itself up by the bootstraps.

But did Apple really manage to leapfrog the mighty and ruthless Microsoft on the strength of good ideas and work ethic alone?

All of the workers who committed suicide in the sweatshop factories were between 18 and 24 years old. As Labor Notes reported, the deaths were “the result of 12-hour shifts, alienation from not being allowed to speak to co-workers, and a rapid just-in-time production model that has workers putting in a phone motherboard every seven seconds to meet the global demand for high-priced gadgets.”

Apple’s skyrocketing fortunes seem to have carried CEO Steve Jobs further away from reality. Steve has defended conditions at the Foxconn plant, saying: “You go in this place, and it’s a factory but, my gosh, they’ve got restaurants and movie theaters and hospitals and swimming pools. For a factory, it’s pretty nice.” (Steve Jobs forgot to mention who actually use the swimming pool and movie theaters after working 12 hours on a production chain…? Read note 3)

While desperate conditions of near-slavery are the most damning indictment of the company, and Microsoft may continue to be perceived as nasty, monopolistic and determined to “preserve the status-quo,” Apple’s reputation for being the opposite is increasingly undeserved.

Apple does make exciting products. I became a convert several years ago after receiving a hand-me-down MacBook from my sister. Today, there might as well be a glowing apple on my back–one of Apple’s products is rarely out of reach, whether it is the laptop I throw in my bag before my daily commute, or the iPhone that lives in my pocket.

But it’s become hard to tell why anyone should consider Apple’s business strategies any differently from those of Microsoft in the 1990s, when the software giant was investigated and penalized for its monopolistic practices by the U.S. and European Union.

Apple is currently a prime candidate for the same kind of investigation. The Justice Department is investigating threats by Apple against two major record companies: Apple was trying to keep the record labels from participating in a promotion for Amazon.com, whose music sales are a rival to Apple’s iTunes.

Considering the state of the corporate music industry today, it’s pretty astounding to think that anyone could intimidate a major label. But with iTunes currently sitting on 70 percent of all digital song sales, Apple is able to do pretty much whatever it wants.

For example: Have you ever tried to use a non-Apple mp3 player with iTunes? Actually, before you answer that, can you even name the top two or three mp3 players not produced by Apple?

This was, in fact, the driving idea behind the iTunes Music Store: to dominate digital music at 99 cents a pop in order to sell millions of music players at up to $499 a pop.

On the off-chance that you do have an mp3 player not made by Apple, you’re probably painfully aware that you simply can’t sync to your Mac’s music collection. Jason Calacanis, writing in The Case Against Apple, invites readers to imagine the outrage if Microsoft had made its Zune the only player compatible with Windows.

Then there’s Apple’s exclusive contract with AT&T for cellular service for the iPhone. As Calacanis says: “Apple’s iPhone is a revolutionary product that has devolved almost all of the progress made in cracking AT&T’s monopoly in the ’70s and ’80s. We broke up the Bell Phone only to have it put back together by the iPhone. Telecommunications choice is gone for Apple users.”

The ridiculous Apple approval process for iPhone applications is the very definition of a monopoly. In the company’s own words, applications aren’t allowed on its mobile operating system that “duplicate the functionality” of software that Apple also makes. So if you compete with Apple, you won’t have access to one of the biggest mobile platforms around today.

This monopoly led to a phenomenon known as “jail-breaking”:  Altering the iPhone to run unauthorized applications. There are countless things that the power of an iPhone should be able to do if the creative power of developers were allowed to run free. Instead of encouraging that creativity, Apple has done everything it can to make each software update render a jail-broken phone inoperable.

Many of the best innovations of independently developed iPhone apps have been co-opted, diluted and incorporated into later versions of Apple’s own software.

In July, during its review of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Library of Congress exempted jail-breaking from the laws restrictions, making it officially legal. It remains to be seen how nicely Apple will play in the wake of this ruling.

By all accounts, Jobs has reinvented not just a corporation but whole industries: animated film (Pixar), music sales (iTunes), audio equipment (iPod) and mobile telephones (iPhone).

The latest iPad device from Apple was widely predicted to revolutionize newspapers, and perhaps the entire publishing industry. I was confused as to why I should shell out for a big iPhone that can’t make phone calls.

For example, audiophiles have long decried the iPod, currently the de-facto standard in portable music players, for its role in promoting the mp3 file format, with its low audio quality, and its refusal to play higher-quality formats.

But you won’t hear any of these debates in the mainstream coverage of Apple. “More features?” How many times can Jobs convince people to wildly overpay for a phone that will be obsolete in a year when Apple adds “more features” that should have been included when the original device was released.

In a recent sales speech, Jobs announced that multitasking, or the ability to run multiple applications simultaneously, would be included with the release of the iPhone 4.0.  Why Apple remembered multitasking after it has sold over 34 million iPhones, 20 million iPod Touches and 2 million iPads before adding multitasking? Apple has sold more than 56 million of these devices worldwide, and they can barely do more than one thing at a time.(Read note 2)

Apple claims that its products are less prone to being infected by the viruses and other digital vandalism that has proliferated in the era of the Internet. In a CNET.com interview, famed hacker-turned-digital-security-consultant Marc Maiffret was clear:

“Anytime there’s been a hacking contest, within a few hours, someone’s found a new Apple vulnerability. If they were taking it seriously, they wouldn’t claim to be more secure than Microsoft because they are very much not…The reason we don’t see more attacks out there compared to Microsoft is because their market share isn’t near what Microsoft’s is”.

The two factors in the targeting of Microsoft products were: One, they were the biggest player in town; and two, they were widely perceived to be monopolistic jerks whose drive for profit was far greater than their desire to encourage exciting software development.

On both counts, Apple should watch out.

Is there anything revolutionary about an overpriced computer crippled by an uncooperative, deliberately closed design, and manufactured under conditions so unbearable they drive people to suicide, just because people can carry it in their pockets?

A genuine revolution would make virtual slavery something associated with an old, out-of-date version of humanity.