Given the context of the discussion, I don't think he was comparing the iPhone OS to Microsoft's OS in the smartphone market. He was comparing the iPhone's market position (i.e. "is it a monopoly") to the position Windows XP held when Microsoft was getting lambasted for abuse of monopoly power by the courts.

In his second sentence, he then talked about the smartphone market, to demonstrate how others provide robust competition to the iPhone (further proof that the market is not a monopoly).

The gist of his message is right... They can't be considered a monopoly since they don't control the market, and Android is a new entrant and is gaining market share, as the link you yourself provided proves.

You didn't read his post, nobody's qualifying monopolies as good or bad here... here's the key phrase :

if Apple was classified as a monopoly, their activities would without a doubt be considered anti competitive, something the OP pretty clearly implied.

I didn't say being a monopoly was "bad", and neither did he, we both said that their present actions could be considered bad were they to be qualified as a monopolist. I said that if Apple were a monopolist, then their behaviour (blocking certain applications from running on their OS) could be interpreted in the same light as Microsoft's actions in the past. In other words as abuse of monopoly power. But to abuse it you have to have it...

Since they are not a monopolist, they can defend their actions by saying that they don't control enough of the market for their behaviour to qualify as market abuse as developers such as Adobe have the ability to produce software for many other platforms and a very large chunk of the market.

The first AP (with the charming "ig'orant" remark) probably just read my post to fast and had an itchy trigger finger. I didn't think I needed to spell my argument out in all its detail, but anyway, this is slashdot, flames are part of the scenery.

My point exactly : Apple's argument is that they're not dominant. But I agree violently with your characterisation of some of their more recent moves as "dickish". There's a slight whiff of megalomania, perhaps a faint odour of superiority, to their reactions to anything that isn't either home-grown or plays within their rules.

...all the people who want to develop applications for sale through the App store, for whom Apple is still the gatekeeper who can enforce whatever rules any way they choose.

Hard to believe this behaviour in the wake of the Microsoft cases heard in Europe and elsewhere, but I suppose Apple can still argue that they don't control enough of the market with the iPhone to be considered a monopolist, and so can impose any conditions on developers that they choose.

But the demand for a product is dependent on the supply curve, and with piracy, what you have is a zero-price channel to market, or a point on the supply curve that's at "infinity" quantity, zero price. In a perfect market, demand would be the total population of people who desire the product even a little bit, at the zero price point, with corresponding revenues of zero for the supplier. The reasons people avoid piracy add a couple of specks of demand elsewhere on the chart, be the reason honesty, convenience, price-insensitivity or fear of enforcement.

In a market with a zero price point, the aberration is that anyone pays for the product at all, not the other way around.

The presence of DRM merely increases the 'price' or decreases the ease or convenience of the piracy channel to market. It will therefore increase legitimate sales, other things remaining equal, regardless of the official price of the product. That's unless there are lots of people who won't buy software if it contains DRM, but I have my doubts about this argument, I think those people are way over-represented on a forum like Slashdot.

Trying to read people's opinions from the shape of a demand curve in the presence of piracy is not possible, it involves solving a multi-variant problem with only two pieces of information, one of which (number of copies pirated) is not accurately derivable anyway. What we're left with is a lot of people using fuzzy logic and presenting conjecture as fact. We cannot know, with the information available, the reasons for people's piracy, which is why the discussions on here are always the same - some people argue that it's all about price points, others argue that its about convenience, some say its about selfishness and an unwillingness to pay for things unless you're forced to, but really, we have insufficient information to know for sure.

As self-respecting geeks, we should be sufficiently adept at statistics to know what we don't know. Personal pet peeve : It would be nice if we could also be self-aware enough to stop presenting our personal opinions, decisions and reactions as in any way representative of the crowd, as so many posts here tend to do (not yours though!)