The "invisible hand of the free market" doesn't work when manufacturing a device requires such a huge infrastructure around it, and benefits so much from economy of scale. "Exploitative business practices must not be that bad or the free market would step in" is a painfully naive take.
You're totally right. How ever will a tiny company like Apple compete against Blackberry with their massive marketshare advantage and extensive supply chain...
Blackberry was never "massive" in the same way that either Android or Apple are today. Blackberry had about 85 million users at its peak and while that sounds like a lot, it was essentially a fancy phone for checking emails and such, and is nowhere near the pervasive penetration in all aspects of society that have happened since then. All sorts of daily activities are harder – or even outright impossible – without an Android or iPhone.
Thats not the argument though. The argument was about the ability for smaller companies to compete with larger incumbents. Specifically, around the impact that advanced manufacturing and supply chain relationships have on that competitiveness. Blackberry certainly had all those advantages at the time.
You're talking about features, of which a company can also develop themselves. There is no app so pervasive on either platform that makes owning an Android or iPhone such a requirement that automatically disqualifies any competitor. Unless of course you mean the UX provided by the OS.
It may be a pain to switch to some new phone or start up, but thats the job of a business. To convince me that their product is worth paying them money for.
Yeah sure, fair enough. I agree that manufacturing isn't key; a small group of hobbyist managed to make the Pine64 phone, which is not "world class" but certainly not bad either, and if some hobbyists can do it then a "real" business can certainly do it (and in fact, many have).
> There is no app so pervasive on either platform that makes owning an Android or iPhone such a requirement that automatically disqualifies any competitor.
I don't know about that; the lack of things like WhatsApp can be a huge downside for your social life. This is not true for everyone of course, depending on where you are in your life, your location, and what kind of friends you have (if any), but it is true for many people. I moved to a different country a few months ago and making friends without WhatsApp is doing it on hard mode.
If I compare this with using FreeBSD and Linux back in the early 2000s when Microsoft was omni-dominant, it's actually much worse. Proprietary formats like .doc and drivers were annoying, but can be reverse-engineered and the only thing really stopping anyone from building something that works for them was just a time investment. Now, it's pretty much impossible because much useful functionality requires access to severs and networked protocols.
That is fair, WhatsApp could be a blocker. Although I think that speaks more about Facebook's Monopoly than Apple's.
However, I would argue that it's the same answer to the hardware problem. You start small, by offering a limited product to a segment of the population that believes in the same features that you care about. As you grow, you then become a target for Facebook to develop a native app for your OS.
I'm not saying it's easy, but the Apple/Android market was built over decades. The iPhone was terrible when it started, but it could call, message and email people. Seems like a good starting point.
Assuming BlackBerry's annual sales were trending up YoY prior to the start of the graph in this article [1] (IMO a safe assumption), then Apple sold more iPods [2] than Blackberry every year starting at least by 2004, 3 years before the first iPhone. They were never a "tiny company" in comparison to BlackBerry.
