The reason why Apple won is Steve Jobs cared about quality and was an asshole about it and the inertia from that after his death has not entirely decayed yet.
The people in that thread need a good Linus Torvalds style rant about their incompetence and several of them should just have been fired.
Yes. When I was working at Apple, I was developing some animation stuff for Keynote. I came in to work one day, and my build was broken completely. Turned out that Roger Rosner had demonstrated this animation feature to Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs hated it, and before then end of the evening the code had been stripped from the Keynote build.
You also don't need to live in a fluffy cotton candy world where everyone pretends to be nice. A CEO needs to be able to directly tell people they're doing a bad job and give out consequences for it. Wrapping the same feedback in fluffy feelings oriented language is a different kind of abusiveness (and why I hate California)
A CEO doesn't have to scream or use insults to tell people they're doing a bad job. Both Linus and Steve loved to make people feel bad, which is completely unnecessary to convey work productivity or give an ultimatum. Plenty of other people produce high-quality results without treating others poorly.
The justification of abuse is just that - the desire to be abusive, and trying to make it okay by pretending it's necessary. Some people see this behavior and like it, because they too would like to be abusive or see people abused. But it has nothing to do with productivity. It's emotional diarrhea.
The people in that thread need a good Linus Torvalds style rant about their incompetence and several of them should just have been fired.