Hate What Apple’s Become? Blame Microsoft. And Sony. And RIM. And…

At any point over the last year, you could be forgiven for momentarily thinking the sheen had come off Apple. A slew of criticisms arose, of the kind that would have severely damaged most companies.

Among them: the App Store has been widely critiqued for its closed nature and arbitrary approval process. Apple has been slammed by Adobe and others for refusing to incorporate Flash, and instead trying to kill it in the process. To make matters worse, many have spoken out against Apple’s obsession with secrecy, blase approach to workers’ rights in China or their notoriously uncommunicative nature.

All of which is to make no mention of the fact that Apple isn’t a populist company in the least – as Anil Dash likes to say, “though Apple is a reasonably progressive company, they explicitly don’t give a shit about poor people”. Apple should, by any reasonable measure, be undergoing a bit of an image revamp – or at least a drop in popularity.

And yet, Apple is still the topic of conversation in the tech world. As today’s information about the iPhone 4G proves, if the tech world is an engine then Apple is its fuel. Every last bit of news is dissected, every announcement pored over obsessively, every last bit of information repeatedly endlessly.

If Apple has, as many have suggested, ‘become evil’, we certainly don’t seem to care very much.

So the company seem to continue to do what they want, with only the slightest acknowledgment of their customers and critics, acting for all intents and purposes more like a totalitarian government than a company that depends on the public, pretending that the entire movements of Web 2.0 and openness just never happened.

And you know what? You know whose fault that is? Microsoft’s. And Sony’s. And RIM’s. And Samsung’s. And every other technology and software company out there.

Yes, I’m serious.

Why? Simple: their inability and unwillingness to compete and innovate has allowed Apple to become the default leader in the world of technology. Apple’s competitors are so frequently bereft of ideas and so often lack a kind of comprehensive vision that Apple seem to exist in the future while everyone else lags in the past. The gang at Cupertino can continue to act with impunity because customers will line up to get the things Apple makes because they just can’t get them elsewhere.

Internet fanboys like to argue this point on principle: Android is more open than the iPhone OS; a netbook is more functional than an iPad; a Cowon MP3 player supports more audio formats; Windows boxes are cheaper. All of which misses one basic point: if you can afford to pay for a better, more integrated experience, you will pay for it because it’s better.

It’s as simple as that. As long as Apple continues to offer superior stuff, people will overlook its flaws because it’s experiences that people care about. It’s not hardware or software or design alone – it’s how all three integrate to form the experience of using something that ‘just works’. And that’s what no-one else has been able to match.

So how can you blame consumers for flocking to Apple? Let’s look at other companies’ offerings.

Blackberry’s response to the iPhone was the abysmal Storm, which offered neither the benefit of a good touchscreen nor the practicality of a Blacberry keyboard. Microsoft’s Phone 7 looks promising, but the best you can say is that it may be on par with the current iPhone, not what’s coming this summer. Motorola’s Droid, which runs Android 2.1, suffers from the same problem – it may have now caught up, but that’s just the problem: nobody is innovating. They are merely playing catch up.

The Android Market cannot compare to the breadth and range of offerings on the App Store. Amazon’s Kindle may have a better selection of books, but its eInk screen appeals to a niche market, at over 50% the cost of a device that not can not only be used to read books, but surf the net, play music, video and do a thousand other things through Apps.

More examples? When quizzed about tablets, a Sony exec claimed “that is a market we are also very interested in. We are confident we have the skills to create a product”. Not exactly inspiring, especially given Sony’s abysmal track record with software and interface. And while Sony’s PSN is okay, it isn’t even available on PCs yet, and iTunes has become the default store for both music and film and TV,  not simply because Apple ‘got there first’ but that they had the foresight and vision to create rather than follow.

Apple certainly doesn’t dominate every field it exists in. The AppleTV may be doing okay, but it certainly hasn’t lit any fires. Windows is still the dominant OS, and with Windows 7, Microsoft can have a legitimate claim that it’s the best one. Yet at the same time, Apple’s competitors have taken to simply playing catch-up to the company rather than creating something of their own. The best thing you can say about any new release is that it’s as good as its Apple counterpart. That is a sign of an industry in a serious and pathetic rut of innovation and inventiveness.

And this isn’t about the genius of Jobs, either. No one who has ever used an iPhone should have produced the Blackberry Storm, and no-one who has watched an 8 or 80 year-old use an iPad should ever think about computing the same way. Yet, companies continue to lumber along aimlessly: Sony are unable to create a decent MP3 player; Microsoft with all its expertise is yet to compete with iPhone OS; Samsung and similar companies produce a slew of subpar offerings; RIM relies on its corporate base, but that advantage will evaporate soon.

No, this is about a failure of imagination, a failure of vision and a failure to understand that it is experiences and not devices that people want. While Apple create unified, integrated ecosystems of services, software and hardware, its competitors try their best to copy only fragments of this holistic approach – and obviously fail.

As long as they do, the arrogance of Apple will simply be the behavior of a company on top of its game and aware that no-one can compete.

And you can put the blame at the feet of Sony, Microsoft, RIM and others, who stumble along blindly, content to follow rather than lead, underserving their customers, apparently unable to see the forest for the trees.