Ask HN: How is Apple's bundling different than what MS in trouble for with IE?
1 comments
I've had this thought for a long time, as someone who used to use exclusively PCs, and now lives in an Apple-centric household.
I'm no lawyer, but the only reason I can think of why Apple hasn't been sued for this is their market penetration: With ~91%--92.5% of all desktops using some version of Windows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...), any small changes made to the default software bundle could affect billions of people. Apple's market penetration, on the other hand, is a little over 7% (in the PC space).
I feel like it's only a matter of time before Apple has to confront the reality of anti-trust legislation in the US and EU, which could be very detrimental to their vertical integration, their restrictions against running OS X on any non-Apple machine, bundling of apps, as you say, and more.
I'm no lawyer, but the only reason I can think of why Apple hasn't been sued for this is their market penetration: With ~91%--92.5% of all desktops using some version of Windows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...), any small changes made to the default software bundle could affect billions of people. Apple's market penetration, on the other hand, is a little over 7% (in the PC space).
I feel like it's only a matter of time before Apple has to confront the reality of anti-trust legislation in the US and EU, which could be very detrimental to their vertical integration, their restrictions against running OS X on any non-Apple machine, bundling of apps, as you say, and more.
See link for additional detail on similarity with Microsoft:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.