It really felt like a forced analogy because the two situations are much different in practice. To have them be the same, Apple would have to be crippling their internal applications and services at the benefit of the external ones.
I think it still works fine if they are crippling external applications for the benefit of the internal ones. Which (as the article mentions and as anyone who has paid attention to the situation already knows) they have been doing all along.
Of course they have, but my point is that the situations are dissimilar. In the case of Microsoft, they are crippling their own software at the behest of another internal project, where as Apple is effectively crippling 3rd party software at the benefit of their own. This means that Microsoft is hurting itself, where as it remains to be seen if Apple is hurting itself, but it isn't doing it intentionally if so.
Yes, I agree the strategy tax analogy is misplaced, in accordance with a since-deleted comment:
> Apple isn't facing a "strategy tax," per the Microsoft example; it's making a strategic mistake.
Except that a mistake is when the downsides outweigh the upsides. We don't yet know if Apple has made such a strategic mistake. So if we can say that Apple has incurred a strategy tax, then it seems like a strategy tax is merely the (omnipresent) downside of any strategic decision.
What is striking about the Microsoft example is (indeed) that the company is actively harming (read: hindering) itself. I'm not sure "tax" is the best descriptive term for this phenomenon, but I think the author intended the distinction. It is a tax in that you are redistributing (within the corpus, and hopefully profitably or at least equitably) the value of certain efforts (read: features).
By crippling 3rd party software, Apple is hurting its platform the way Microsoft is hurting itself. Whether or not the hurting is intentional is beside the point.
