Has Apple become a victim of its own success?

livemint.com:

Are most revolutions doomed to become the very thing they sought to overthrow? In the world of business, this question arises in the case of Apple, widely seen as the world’s top brand. It began with a mission to bust the paradigm of centralized big-frame computing by empowering “the rest of us" with personal computers of our own. This was the story captured by 1984, a TV commercial it aired that year which showed it taking on Big Brother of George Orwell’s novel by that name.

Directed by Ridley Scott, this ad-film was 60 seconds of fantasy iconoclasm that made an icon of Apple, although the ‘knowledge byte’ of its logo also projected it as a champion of digital democracy. The company’s real revolution, though, was wrought more than two decades later, and not by virtue of an easy-to-use computer, but a hand-held gadget called the iPhone that gave us access to the internet’s wonders at the swipe of a thumb. Instead of one giant screen looming over everyone in an Orwellian metaphor for central authority, we have billions of little screens ready to run apps for us in a triumph of individual liberty.

Or so it may seem till we consider the power that Apple wields over the apps we use and online spaces we reach. Is Apple Inc the Big Brother of our cyber lives today? In India, such a charge may sound odd, since most smartphones are Android devices, loaded with Google’s rival operating system. In the US, however, where Apple’s iPhone has over two-thirds of the market, the Department of Justice (DoJ) last week charged the company with abusing its monopoly by acting in ways that throttle rivals and thwart innovation.