• @entropicdrift
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    177 months ago

    Do they really think they can “beat” some of the best programmers in the world that actually controls the servers their service is dependent on?

    Compaq “beat” IBM.

    Apple can only change the iMessage protocol itself very slowly if they don’t want to break service for millions of older iPhones. Beeper Mini can and will change on a dime. The cat and mouse can only go so far before Apple run out of ways to try to fuck them over that don’t fuck over millions of legitimate users.

    • @tombuben@beehaw.org
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      87 months ago

      Not just that. Apple themselves beat Microsoft where they reverse engineered MS Office and played the cat and mouse game long enough that Microsoft released their office file format specifications publicly for everyone as a standardized format.

    • @helenslunch@feddit.nl
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      7 months ago

      Compaq “beat” IBM.

      I don’t know anything about Compaq. Was their business built on reverse engineering IBMs system and impersonating IBM hardware to gain unauthorized access to their servers and services?

      Apple can only change the iMessage protocol itself very slowly

      They changed it in <3 days.

      iMessage is a giant cash cow for them. They’ve stated as much. They will dedicate a massive amount of resources to ensure that is not lost.

      Beeper users will eventually become tired after the 3rd or 4th time they can’t send/receive messages to Apple users at all anymore because they can’t deregister their phone number from iMessage and Beeper Mini is broken.

      • @entropicdrift
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        7 months ago

        I don’t know anything about Compaq. Was their business built on reverse engineering IBMs system and impersonating IBM hardware to gain unauthorized access to their servers and services?

        It was actually even more hardcore than that. They reverse engineered IBM’s BIOS to create the first fully compatible non-IBM PC that could run MS-DOS and all IBM PC software natively. Then they won in court after proving they didn’t copy any of IBM’s source code and that the people who programmed the compatible BIOS had never even seen the original documentation for the IBM code, let alone the code itself.

          • @entropicdrift
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            77 months ago

            Basically the answer to your question is “yes, and it was way more lucrative than Beeper Mini is”

            • @helenslunch@feddit.nl
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              17 months ago

              They reverse engineered IBM’s BIOS to create the first fully compatible non-IBM PC that could run MS-DOS and all IBM PC software natively

              This doesn’t sound like anything that’s dependent on IBM servers or services. It also doesn’t sound like something that IBM could realistically fix easily and retroactively, which is the case here with Apple.