Software companies have high gross margins because the measure excludes the cost of developing and maintaining the software. So Autodesk's gross margins are 90

Software companies have high gross margins because the measure excludes the cost of developing and maintaining the software. So Autodesk's gross margins are 90%, Adobe's are 86%, etc. When you see numbers like that, it should tell you that you are not capturing the expenses of the company in that metric, rather than concluding the company is earning fantatiscally high profits. With Apple, the investment is in the platform, which includes everything from designing their own chips to writing their own OS and exposing and maintaining APIs for third party apps to use, as well the development costs of the infrastructure behind the app-store itself. None of those costs appear in a gross margin calculation. Not saying that Apple should or should not fall under anti-monopoly laws or that we shouldn't change our monopoly laws away from the current consumer harm focus towards more of an innovation-harm focus, but discussions of gross margin are highly misleading when assessing the expenses paid by software companies -- as is the cited article.