Apple, the modern Knights Templar

I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed II a lot lately, and simply put – it’s a great game. It has the Knights Templar in it as the main enemy and architects of conspiracies and coincidentally I had to spend some time in an actual Templar related organisation (at least they call themselves Templars, although the order was officially disbanded in the 14th century and their possessions given to the Knights Hospitaller. A group, which used to own the island of Rhodes. But I’m on a tangent here.)

Most people don’t know much about the Templars, but they were the first true multinational corporation and pretty much succeeded in everything they did – They even owned the whole island of Cyprus at one point. They invented a form of cheques (letter of credit) that allowed crusaders to deposit their money in their country of origin and get a piece of paper that stated the value of their deposit – and when the “pilgrims” arrived in the holy land, they could walk to a Templar Express to pick up their check. Pretty cool. This pretty much helped invent the banking system when someone figure out to take interest on the money.

The biggest benefit the Templars had was a serious boon. The only guy they answered to? The root of all evil. The Pope. Literally, the Knights Templar did not have to respect local and/or national laws. Or pay taxes. They could travel freely throughout Europe (and pretty much everywhere else), own land and do pretty much the hell they wanted (they were pretty badass as well, one of their most famous victories was in 1177 during the Battle of Montgisard, where some 500 Templar knights helped to defeat Saladin’s army of more than 26,000 soldiers). So they did.

Relatively a few of the Templars were actually soldiers and knights, but they had supporting staff and businessmen running the show in the background – and THOSE guys are the guys I’m writing about today. They had nearly infinite (at that time) resources and they were smart. They didn’t play by the book, they innovated and progressed at an amazing rate, naturally pissing off most of the local empires, city states and kingdoms. When the latter realized they couldn’t out-compete the Templars, they started playing dirty. If they would have had a proper legal system back then, and instead of assassins they would have had lawyers, the Templars would have been sued silly.

Now, to me, it’s been real funny reading all these stories of Adobe, Nokia and now even Nintendo being worried about Apple taking over their business. (Also, to continue with the knight theme, Google is obviously similar to the Knights Hospitaller or the Teutonic Knights (who owned Prussia) – who, instead of opposing the “ruling powers” started working together with them, although all of them still got seriously bitch slapped by their rulers.) But I don’t expect to see Teutonic Google suing Apple, because I think they seriously try to out-innovate Apple and play as fairly as possible.

The others are playing the roles of cardinals and kings, poisoning and assassinating their will through and I think that’s just lame.

Related posts:

1. Bad Apple
2. Greener Apple
3. Passion for games
4. Fish squeezing birds from tiny islands
5. Parade of Cheese