Maybe I just remember it differently because at the time I was using Linux and always looking for ways to deal with everyone else who used Office and/or Exchang

Maybe I just remember it differently because at the time I was using Linux and always looking for ways to deal with everyone else who used Office and/or Exchange, but IMO the "New Apple == Old Microsoft" comparison is way off base. Apple is easy to avoid, trivial even, you can buy one of many other music players, buy other phones and use other media managers. You don't need to use any Apple product unless you opt-in to their system (buying a device) and even if you do opt-in, if you buy DRM-free tracks (which Apple pushed for, btw) you can leave iTunes any time you want if you buy a non-Apple device (the only exception being video which is still DRM-laden AFAIK). Old Microsoft was impossible to avoid because government and businesses opted you in, and you couldn't opt-out no matter how hard you tried if you wanted to interact with those systems. Word documents were difficult or impossible to reverse engineer and MS did what it could to prevent any advancement in that area, and Exchange was nearly impossible to interface with (it's still problematic) if you weren't using Outlook. I mean, it's not like government and businesses are using iTunes and thereby forcing people to buy Apple products to interact with the corporate iTunes system (as was the case with old Microsoft, Exchange and Office). Besides, Apple is certainly behaving badly, granted, but in this case they aren't even pressuring the labels to stop doing business with Amazon, they're pressuring them to stop giving Amazon a day of exclusivity. The Old Microsoft way was to threaten to cut off vendors just for competing, not for giving a competitor an advantage.