"I call this the Apple Deathstar. Like its Star Wars counterpart, Apple has created a kind of interplanetary weapon that has the capacity to quickly raze entire planets, or at least entire companies." The Death Star was built with the purpose of destroying planets. Apple was not started to destroy other companies. I'll grant that he uses the words "has the capacity" not "actively uses to". Maybe words like "stole" don't have a moral connotation in this context, but the sentence "Apple gutted a host of firms, all of which were reliant on the same customers." seems a bit aggressive or accusatory. I understand that in context, it kind of makes sense, but when you stack up the title, and some of the verbiage, the article could be mistaken (by fools such as myself) as having a tone. Again, this isn't an Apple thing. I just don't like his metaphor. I think thenewgreen was right, the "hyperbolic title" hooked me and got me to read it... so perhaps it's perfect. (embarrassed confession - I had been reading too many articles too late the other night and confused this article with another that was written by a woman - hence all of the feminine pronouns in my first comment)
But it was. The moment you form a company for the purpose of selling something, anything, for profit, that is exactly what you are doing. You're competing for market share, and trying to take the lifeblood of profit away from as many competitors in that market as you can. This isn't evil, it's just the way it is. If all Steve Jobs wanted to do was make computers, he could have. He didn't want to just make computers, -thousands of hobbyists do that. He wanted to sell them and compete in the marketplace. I think this quote of his is illustrative: "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40bn in the bank, to right this wrong...I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this." Now granted, this is over a patent dispute. But my point is that Apple is trying to do that to it's competitors in every category regardless. Yes, without as much vitriol, but really, who cares how flowery your words are (or aren't) if the result is the same. For profit companies are formed to sell and compete in the marketplace, -to destroy as many competitors as they can. It's not mean, it's not evil, but it is true.