[stcredzero]

Get them to 90% of the market share.

This is where Microsoft blew it. Instead of taking over all the business desktops in the world, they should've left it just at a huge fraction, but got their customers into their own tightly controlled walled garden.

Get them to cripple other companies by withholding (or threatening to withhold) OEM-priced licenses if they work with a competitor.

I'm reminded of how they'll not let you publish your app if it uses a different browser engine.

[Jtsummers]

Apple does not have such a sufficient hold on the market that anyone has to target their users for customers. Android has the majority of the market share for mobile devices by a pretty decent margin. Apple has not gone out of its way like MS did to block people from entering the general market (like MS did with BeOS and Netscape), let alone the market on their system.

BeOS was going to be sold by Compaq. MS told Compaq that they'd have to pay the higher, direct-to-customer, cost for Windows licenses if they also sold BeOS, as opposed to the OEM license cost. Compaq nixed the deal with Be, because they couldn't afford the hit to their profit margin (PC margins were slim then, though they got tighter in the future).

MS spent the money to develop IE, and then a billion dollars marketing it. And they gave it away for free. Why? Because Netscape offered the potential (though still in its infancy) for web apps that would reduce/eliminate the market for native applications, which MS relied on. Not because MS sold applications (they did, and do, of course), but because they sold the OS that most native apps ran on.

Apple may eat up a lot of profits (30% cut) and restrict a lot of options (can't use third party browser engines, limits on use of embedded languages and side loading applications). But they aren't pulling off half the shit MS did, and have nowhere the influence to do it if they wanted to (w.r.t. market share).