Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has slammed Big Tech companies for monopolizing the market and abusing their power, saying Apple and others should have split up into autonomous divisions “a long time ago.”
“I am really against monopoly powers being used in unfair antitrust manners, not opening up the world to equal competition, using your power in unfair ways, and I think that’s happened a lot in Big Tech and they can get away with a lot of bad things,” Wozniak said in an interview with Bloomberg Technology.
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He noted that a company with a strong presence in one market using that presence to grow in another market “is sort of unfair,” noting that he is “in favor of looking into splitting up companies.”
“I wish Apple on its own had split up a long time ago and spun off independent divisions to faraway places and let them think independently the way Hewlett Packard did when I worked there,” Wozniak stated, alluding to the split of Hewlett Packard in 2015, when the company was divided into a printer and PC division (HP) on one hand, and data storage and enterprise business (HPE) on the other.
“I think Big Tech has gotten too big; it’s too powerful a force in our life, and it’s taken our choices away,” Wozniak concluded.
During the 1990s, the company did take steps to spin out divisions, like the Newton division, for instance. But when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the Newton project and many others alongside it were recalled.
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Unlike Facebook and Amazon, Apple is not yet the subject of an official antitrust investigation, although it did face a number of antitrust complaints filed by third parties, like the music-streaming service Spotify. The company also faces an official inquiry in Russia after cyber-security company Kaspersky Lab accused it of unfair competition in the smartphone application market.
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