heres how to record a phone call with a smartphone heres what you can do on techthe underdog tactics and fighting spirit that once served tech companies well now make them look petty and meanvideocreditcreditby james kerr scorpion daggerjune 22 2020this article is part of the on tech newsletter you can sign up here to receive it weekdaysthe american technology industry was built on the white hot rage of underdogswhen apple was founded it mocked ibm as a bully that made terrible computers pipsqueak google made microsoft its mortal enemy the young uber hated everyone basically its energizing to be the scrappy upstart fighting a rich superpower or the big bad systemthe technology companies still like to believe that theyre davids except many of them are now goliaths and the underdog tactics and fighting spirit that once served them well now make these companies look petty and meanallow me to point you in the direction of lawsuits that amazon has repeatedly filed against employees who leave its cloudcomputing business for other jobsthe most recent lawsuit said that a former marketing employee who was hired at google possesses valuable amazon secrets in part because he wrote marketing speeches and made presentation slides look at this incredibly revealing amazon secret for example amazon has said that its enforcing clauses in contracts that limit what its employees can do after they leavegoogle is big enough that it can presumably wait this lawsuit out but how many other amazon employees or potential employers are willing to risk the stress and uncertainty of possible litigationthen theres apple which continues to butt heads with app makers including spotify and most recently the email service hey the hey drama continued monday morning these feuds are over money apple with some justification wants a share of the revenue that app companies earn when they sell to you and me in apples app store the app companies want to keep all of itfinancial disagreements are common but apple can sound defensive and aggrieved in these cases it created its rule book for app developers more than a decade ago and apple doesnt get why these companies are complainingapple and the app makers now live on different planets in 2008 the year apple started the iphone app storefront the company had nearly 33 billion in sales last year it had 260 billion apple mans the gate to hundreds of millions of iphones when youre that big every business disagreement is lopsided kara swisher a contributing opinion writer for the new york times made a similar point in her column last weekit seems as if everywhere you look former tech upstarts are turning the tables on todays youngsters facebook made obvious copies of snaps bitmoji personalized cartoon characters facebook and google are pitching hard their own alternatives to the suddenly popular zoom video service copying smaller companies is not a great looknone of these giants is necessarily doing anything wrong or unusual when they emulate sue or pick fights with