Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting. I think you make good points re: their strategies--but those strategies have s

Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting. I think you make good points re: their strategies--but those strategies have some risks for those pursuing them, and the consumer tends to benefit either way. If google can hurt apple's margins, the consumer wins. Meanwhile, if they can't, they just end up giving away a bunch of phones. And to my knowledge, no company has been able to maintain the kinds of gross margins Apple has without becoming a monopoly. The apple brand is a kind of monopoly, and patents add monopolistic properties to innovation. But no brand lasts forever, and the big players all have patents they can use against each other, somewhat damping their appeal with MAD Meanwhile, on the privacy front, I suspect we'll see more push back on this in coming years. Better privacy laws are probably good for the consumer, but could be catastrophic to many companies that currently place huge theoretical value on their big data. If strong restrictions come into place on how you can and can't use that data, suddenly it's not quite as valuable as first thought. So I'm generally optimistic that this is still the kind of competition that helps consumers.