Kara & Scott's ???? brain fart on Apple

I was surprised to hear Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway ’s collective brain fart re the Apple anti-trust case (~17:00 in the March 26, 2024 episode of their Pivot podcast).

I’m a regular listener of their Pivot podcast. They’re a great team and I often find myself nodding in agreement with both of them, or cheering one of them when the other is way off base.

To start off, as an app company owner, I think that they are 100% spot on about the need for anti-trust action against the App Store dictatorship under Apple’s iron fist.

But their brain fart came when they discussed SMS interoperability:

“If you want to buy the iPhone, they don’t have to make it easy for it to interoperate…in that case, I find it a ridiculous argument.” “Their investment in going vertical here gives them the right to inhibit or diminish …” “I think they [DOJ] overdid it.”

Their agreed upon take seemed to be that the DOJ’s case was weak, especially on the “green bubbles”: the unencrypted & in some cases inoperable messaging treatment that non-Apple users receive when sending/receiving texts with Apple phones.

What Kara & Scott missed is that interoperability, or lack thereof, was a core component of the anti-trust findings against Microsoft in the ‘90s!

Microsoft purposefully made it a subpar experience for competitors to be successful using Windows and Office.

They favored their own apps (the browser, productivity apps) and made communicating with third-party apps a difficult and subpar experience (converting content from their formats like Word docs).

Sound familiar?

ref: https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-fact#FOF