The Back Page: My witness, your honor (Member Post)
It could have been so much worse.
It’s not often that you see the CEO of the world’s biggest company on the witness stand of a trial brought by the maker of a game that features a naked banana. I mean, this kind of thing happens once every couple years. Tops.
While Tim Cook wasn’t the only Apple executive to go under oath, the general consensus seems to be that he made out worse than Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi. In particular, it seems hard to swallow that Cook, a detail-oriented leader if ever there were one, couldn’t summon to mind the value of a search engine deal with Google or how profitable the company’s own App Store is.1 Frankly, it strains credulity.
But it could have been so much worse.
How, you wonder? Well, Epic’s main thrust in the recently concluded trial seems to have been making Apple look, for lack of a better word, crappy. And it might have succeeded on that account, but really, it feels like, if anything, Epic held back. It could have gone further. It could have brought out the big guns.
If all Epic wanted was to make Apple look bad, there were so many other tacks it could have taken, but really, it comes down to just one thing: all they really had to do was to let a single Apple customer cross-examine Tim Cook.…
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