Open and Shut

However, I think that it gets harder to stay closed over time. As markets mature, products have to do more - interface with more hardware, be deployed in more scenarios and so on. The "ecosystem" becomes important - how many apps do you have, how compatible are you with the relevant bits of hardware? Apple have done fantastically well at both of these things, ensuring a large and high-quality app store, and good integration options. You can switch almost your entire digital life over to Apple products and this works.

But will it always work? Will Apple always be able to ensure that your Apple devices integrate smoothly with your self-driving car, your 3D printer, your home automation systems? As the size and scope of your "entire digital life" gets bigger and bigger, it becomes increasingly difficult for Apple to control the entire ecosystem. Not impossible, but to do it they need to keep on executing at a very high level. They need to be able to say to people that across a very wide range of devices, the Apple device is always the best choice, that you don't need openness and interoperability because why would you ever choose something that's not Apple? And to do that, you do need "genius".

They're already failing somewhat. I don't know many people who think that iCloud is better than Google's equivalent, or Dropbox. iTunes is unloved by most people who use it, surviving largely on lock-in effects and Apple's good commercial skill in dealing with the music industry. If I stop caring about iCloud and iTunes, it becomes much easier for me to stop caring about my iPhone and use an Android (or WP or Firefox or Sailfish or whatever) device instead, because Dropbox and Spotify are open and don't make it difficult for me to do that.

TL;DR: Maintaining a closed ecosystem is difficult in direct proportion to the number of different components in the ecosystem, and the number of components is only going to go up.

Shorter Tim Wu...

(1) Apple is the most successful and profitable company in the world today.

(2) Apple is one of the most closed companies in tech.

(3) Ergo closed is bad.

> That’s the entirety of Wu’s second meaning of “open” — a comparison between a web browser and an operating system.

I think he missed the point here. In Firefox everything gets treated more or less equally, whereas on the iPhone certain apps get treated better than others. For example, there's the whole "only allowed to use Safari renderer" nonsense.

>Mozilla now has its own mobile OS, on which, I’ll bet, there are at least some apps you cannot remove.

I imagine the only apps on Moz you won't be able to remove would be ones that deal with system settings. To be seen, but there'd be no reason not to build it that way.

I agree, however, Gruber's writing doesn't make it really obvious that he's slamming someone for confusing making money vs, say adoption of a technology. In fact, if you read both articles, neither author has a clear concept of "open vs closed".

The fact that high-tech systems eventually have to somehow integrate with other high-tech systems is always glossed over. This "ecosystem" like behavior is what separates high tech from, say, steel (an example used by Wu). You build steel for a bridge, your customer buys that steel, they probably don't think, "well, in 10 years, if you go out of business, where am I going to get some more steel?"

"The Mac was closed in the ’80s and thrived, much like Apple does today: with a decent but minority market share, and very healthy profit margins. It began to suffer — both in terms of scarily low dwindling market share and unprofitability — only in the mid-’90s. At this point, the Mac had become no more closed, but had become technically and aesthetically stagnant. And then came Windows 95, which altered the closed/open equation not one bit, but which closed the design quality gap with the Mac significantly. Windows thrived, the Mac withered, and it had nothing to do with openness and everything to do with engineering and design quality. Windows had gotten a lot better, and the Mac had not."

There are a couple of more lines in the article that highlight this point as well but this paragraph really brings the point home. It also shows that Wall Street is not completely crazy when it comes to dropping the stock price of Apple. Wall Street cares (short term) more about growth than anything else. And unless Apple opens up and dominates another sector like it did with the IPhone and the IPad we will not see the same rate of growth as we did before.

Even the newest, shiniest phones have poor battery life, limited wireless availability, and difficult input, so vertically integrated companies will dominate (Apple, Samsung). When batteries, chips, antennas, etc are so cheap and great that tinkerers can make a serviceable phone on Kickstarter, phones will cease to be huge profit centers and design and manufacturing will be distributed and fragmented, like PCs are now. The Open will have won.

Innovators Dilemma and Innovators Solution will teach you more than a thousand flame wars. Open-closed is a meaningless distinction unless you also know product quality and customer needs.

Open beats closed over a longer time scale. It's an overall industry trend, not a scoreboard for individual companies.

windowsphone/surface fanboys, take note.