Apple makes their money from selling products and services rather than selling the user. At least that's the perception. Apple also gets their share of this kind of criticism, but it invites much less of it in this way.
Microsoft could be in the same category. They've both had some pretty bad periods, no doubt, but they have been smart and quite diversified for the last decade at least. Same generation of startups too. There might be some insight in that, what changed?
I don't agree. Microsoft is obviously transitioning into user selling pretty quickly and apparently with great pleasure. It's on a completely different level than Apple. (To be fair, it's not looking very great there either recently.)