When you have a small elite, they don't need to collude, they just develop a common climate of thought and common understanding of the future.

What pains me to think about - that these people are really brilliant for the most part, those whose names I know. Even Steve Jobs. And they were brilliant still for a few years after getting significant power.

That power still corrupted them, and this amount of "brilliant" is like a whole era, a whole phenomenon of humanity, being proven wrong.

Early 90s Apple is very nice to learn about, and early 90s Microsoft was powerful, but not evil yet, and early 90s Oracle was a really good company. And remember what Google was in its early years, they seemed the front line of the new age of openness and freedom. I won't say anything good about early Facebook, but apparently it too managed to be good for someone.

So much for corporate propaganda.

Heh, maybe the problem started when they changed their name. They aren't "Apple Computer" any more, they're just "Apple". That must have happened somewhere around 2005.