this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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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.
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.
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.
Basically the answer to your question is "yes, and it was way more lucrative than Beeper Mini is"