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Originally Posted by FlameOn
While I agree that that perhaps the position may have in played a part in how a company behaves, there certainly are companies that do not act this way given a similar market position in their respective markets. With the exception of Microsoft, Apple is the most litigious company in tech history at the moment. They've sued every competitor at this point except ZTE, Huawei and Sony. ZTE and Huawei are both state-owned so the potential for problems with their operations in China would be great. I'm not sure about Sony though.
Apple is using the courts as a anti-competitive market exclusion tool by seeking injunctions in their cases while Microsoft at times could be view as greedy (afterall they extracted over $9billion in 26 different offensive lawsuits), they didn't seek consistent outright bans on competing products. Other companies can't even negotiate either as the terms offered are neither fair nor reasonable. It's either accept our terms or face injunctive lawsuit. A lot of patents being used for are also look and feel non-essential "design" patents which until now were considered low-value.
What Apple is doing with their behaviour is pretending they have an exclusive right on innovation. While I do agree yes they did create the first user-friendly, attractive and accessible smartphone, they are far from the first. They taken the position that, "It's okay for us to copy others but when others copy us we will destroy them any way we can". It's can be viewed as a very hypocritical attitude which completely discounts the work of others before as well as preventing the work of others going forward. All this coupled with Apple's self-righteous and smug behaviour/statements tend to rub a whole lot of people the wrong way.
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Other companies simply don't have the same market positioning as Apple does. They're doing exactly what they should be doing.