In a recent interview with Bloomberg Television, Roger McNamee, the managing partner and co-founder of Elevation Partners, said Apple is acting like a "dumb monopolist" in how it's operating.
McNamee said Apple has been making moves that are "obviously anti-competitive." He cited the company's App Store and recent changes to its retail stores as examples of some of its anti-competitive moves.
"Now they're consciously trying to slow down web applications on their platforms – [such as] HTML 5, the next-generation web development environment," McNamee said. "You look at that and go, 'guys, why are you doing that?' All the HTML 5 development is on Apple platforms; just let it happen. ... When I look at Apple today, I see them doing crazy things. Like they laid off a ton of people who worked in the Apple Stores. The retail experience went down the toilet the next day, to the point where there was this huge backlash and they were forced to rehire some of the people."
As a stockholder, McNamee was disappointed, as he said cutting costs was not a competitive decision for a company with the "highest-margin hardware business in the last 25 years." Such a decision harms Apple's brand by reducing the value of Apple stores, McNamee said. He then went on to say that after Steve Jobs died, Apple has begun to do "all the thing you would expect a dumb monopolist to do."
In addition to his criticism for Apple as a whole, McNamee wasn't impressed with Apple's iPhone 5 announcement.
"The iPhone 5 is the first one that's not a giant leap forward hardware-wise against Android," he said. "... I mean, it's cool, but it's not like blow-away cool the way that the iPhone 4 was. And I look at this and I go, 'huh?' You always wonder what's going to be the end for a monopolist, and you can see that Apple's already doing the things that – it'll take five years, but they're doing the things that lead to becoming less successful."
Source: Bloomberg Television
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