I think this is beautifully written. Giving a lot of context as to "why" they way they are now. I even like it was tagged as "Rant". Which isn't really my standard rant at all. At least not "angry" rant.

It also capture a lot of things that I share. Especially post Steve Jobs' Apple.

>With Apple I didn’t understand the dynamics.

The dynamics is very simple. Once you understand one thing. As a developer, the user using your App are not your user, they are Apple's user. Apple is granting you access to their user base. Another way to think about it is the App Store, Apple is sharing 70% you earned from Apple's user to you. Rather than Apple taking 30% from you. The first one implies Apple think that 100% ( or vast majority ) of those value belongs to Apple in the first place. While the second is Apple's tax on your value you created.

That is to say Apple treat its developer as an extension of their own. And ultimately only to serve Apple's user ( or Apple's interest ). This is not just on software but also on hardware. As anyone in supply chains working with Apple would understand this.

>Apple’s own music player was, and still is, unusably bad....... think it is because the people who're making these apps were never around in the Justin Frankel era of Winamp.

I have been stating this since the dawn of Apple Music. If anyone remember, when Tim Cook launch Apple Music. It was all about the magical "Next Song". That is the modern day speak of AI knowing what the next song should be. That was the pitch from Jimmy Iovine on Beats Music, from a guy who thinks they have some of the best sound quality in the headphone market. Luckily the original "taste" of Apple's speaker quality didn't get diluted by this acquisition. Many thanks to those ex- B&W engineers. But iTunes was basically swallowed by Apple Music, or Beats. For some time Apple Music doesn't even have a loop for listening to the same song repeatedly. They want you to listen to the "Next Song". It was a platform primarily designed for New Music Discovery. Hence the Design is centred around Radio and curated playlist. Rather than "letting what user want which is to curate their own music library in iTunes". Quote from an NBC interview with Steve Jobs in 2006. ( Full Interviews on the Internet are all dead for some strange reason. ) And then every version of Apple Music they added back some pieces of iTunes function. But the design remains the same as it was in 1.0. It was first and foremost designed for New Music Discovery. Or to quote Jimmy Iovine, 2016 that the intention for the service is to become a "cultural platform", and Apple wants the service to be a "one-stop shop for pop culture". It you watch Apple closely and think where some of these culture changes came. That is probably the start of it.

>Which brings me to the third thread of this story, how all this made me reevalute my relationship with companies.

The bulk of many of these conversion is that we are comparing Steve Job's Apple against Tim Cook's Apple. Those of us who were there before the iPhone. And the two are a very different company. Modern day Apple is very much profit driven development model. From Product segmentation, service strategy to operational efficiency.

The Final Quote :

"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.

So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.

So that's what happened at Xerox, that the people at Xerox PARC used to call the people that ran Xerox tonerheads. And they just had these tonerheads would come out to Xerox PARC and they just had no clue about what they were seeing." - Steve Jobs