How did Apple flourish despite Neal Stephenson's prediction that proprietary software companies would fail?
Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California that designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and online services. The company's hardware products include the iPhone smartphone, the iPad tablet computer, the Mac personal computer, the iPod portable media player, the Apple Watch smartwatch, the Apple TV digital media player, and the HomePod smart speaker. Apple's consumer software includes the macOS and iOS operating systems, the iTunes media player, the Safari web browser, and the iLife and iWork creativity and productivity suites. Its online services include the iTunes Store, the iOS App Store and Mac App Store, Apple Music, and iCloud.
MacSpeech The first commercial voice dictation product for Mac OS X was IBM's ViaVoice, but ScanSoft, the company that had exclusive global distribution rights to ViaVoice, merged with Nuance and stopped developing ViaVoice for Macintosh. (The first dictation software for Mac OS 9 was Articulate System's PowerSecretary.) Seeing a continued need in the market for a Mac-based speech-to-text solution, MacSpeech was founded in 1996 by Andrew Taylor, a former employee of Articulate Systems and an expert in software-based speech recognition technologies.