What did Microsoft get in trouble for?

They were found liable for anti-competative practices because they put Internet Explorer on Windows and then inserted a code into the software that prevented consumers from using competing, third-party browsers.

All of that was in the software licensing agreement that every end user agreed to when they opened the box. Yet Microsoft was still found liable and paid massive fines and settlements.

How is that any different than Apple not allowing third-party applications and making iTunes songs playable only on the iPhone and iTunes and not other players??

One of the strongest arguments in the law is analogy. I see a pretty big similarity between the Microsoft case and what Apple has been doing.

Please distinguish them for me because I don't see many big differences.

 

A lot of things. Software dumping, meaning giving stuff away for "free" solely to eat market share and remove other players from the market (e.g. Netscape). Generally uncompetitive business practices regarding Windows, IE, and other software.

The key difference here is that Windows was never designed, sold, marketed or intended to be a single widget embedded operating system. It was, and is a consumer operating system which is understood to run any compatible software regardless of who writes it, and run on just about any compatible hardware (to one degree of success or another...)

The iPhone OS is not sold separately from the device. The iPhone hardware is not sold in a "bare" form. You are buying the thing as so much a toaster or microwave, it works the way it was designed to work, and any extensibility is bound to the method Apple chooses to allow. It is no different than any other cell phone, GPS device, MP3 player, or what have you. The vendors of those devices are under no obligation to make available methods for me to run un-approved software on said devices.

I should point out that when the iPhone was originally released, there were no third party applications of any kind.

That's not entirely the case. They were found liable for anti-competative practices because they bundled IE into the OS, gave it away for free, and generally made it difficult to remove specifically to gain market share and harm another software company.

You could certainly run other browsers on windows, however, at the time browsers were a commercial software product. IE was "free" and dumped on the market via windows bundling. THAT was anti-competative.

The iPhone is a very different product. You could as easily argue that Mac OS X should run on anyone's hardware. Apple did not design it to do so, they do not suggest or market it as being able to do anything of the sort, nor can any reasonably assume that doing so is possible. The same is true for the iPhone. You're buying it as marketed, with the understanding that if you buy the thing and you want applications on it other than those that ship with it, you're getting them from the app store. If you don't want to do that, then you buy another phone.

That's nothing at all like Microsoft's anti-trust case or the business practices that brought it about.

First: Apple does allow third-party applications on the iPhone. That's where the App Store applications come from. The caveat is that apps submitted to the App Store must meet certain criteria, like for example not compromising user data, crashing the phone, etc. That is not a Microsoft-esque "we're blocking software we don't like", it's a "we don't want crap software crashing the phone" decision which is very much in line with their design ethos.

Second: The iTunes Music Store files that were originally DRM protected were done so, as I said, as a requirement of the labels providing them to sell them in the first place. Apple fully disclaimed they would only play natively on Apple devices. They also made it quite clear that you could burn X CDs containing said music for your personal use and use them on whatever the hell device you wanted.

Since the DRM went away, anything you buy from iTMS will play on anything that supports AAC encoded audio, which is just about anything these days.

 

Dayum. You certainly have your information together.

You should be Apple's lawyer!

 

I think a competing app store, if there was one, will just promote apple even more and show how much they've progressed and succeeded in this category.