Apple Wins Copyright Case Against Clone Company- Psystar

Apple wins again in its never ending struggle to remain the smallest computer company in the world. Psystar was buying the Mac operating system from Apple, installing it in their clones and selling them. Critics called them Hackintoshes. Yet this is exactly what all Windows systems products do. Dell buys the Windows operating system, installs it in their PCs and sells it to you. Long ago Apple decided that no other company would have the opportunity to sell their product- sort of a backwards logic that wealth will somehow be diluted if more companies are sharing the market. The ruling is most interesting because history has already proven them wrong, way wrong, and yet they continue the dream, like an investment in personal ego that remains blind to reality.

The ruling allows Apple to continue to sell it’s superior operating system exclusively within it’s own computer and the public gets overcharged for the product. Sort of a minopoly- if you want it, pay for it approach to business. The consumer gets the short end of the stick and Apple ensures its teeny-weeny share of the market.

It’s too bad really. Mac has a better operating system than Microsoft ever had. Yet they took a philosophical direction long ago pursuing a closed architecture, rather than open architecture, and well, the rest is history. Today Mac owns a whopping 5% of the computer business, although you wouldn’t know that by all the commercials they run on TV. Dell is the largest seller of computers in the world, quite possibly more than 10 times the sales volume of Apple, yet they don’t even advertise. They do it by selling a comparable product at half to one third the price of Apple. It reminds me of the old gamblers saying, the winner likes to chitchat and the loser screams deal!

For the less informed, or less interested PC buffs, Apple was the first company to introduce the mouse into a computer at a time when the world was struggling with IBM PCs running the Microsoft DOS operating system. The IBM had all the capabilities of a typewriter, nothing more, when Apple was introduced and provided most of the capabilities we take for granted today. If Apple had taken an open systems approach when it first introduced the Macintosh (or even the Apple) while Microsoft was still trying to figure out how to connect a mouse to their early PCs, today Steve Jobs would be the richest man in the world and Bill Gates would just be an unknown Harvard dropout.

By insisting on a closed architecture, Apple will continue to lose market share and will eventually become extinct like celibate Shakers. They too made a good product, but their business plan was severely flawed from the start!