“And now you can begin to see why I think that rather than
standing on the verge of an unprecedentedly successful second act,
Jobs may be about to replay the same mistakes of almost three
decades ago. Will developers wish to tie themselves to the whims of
Steve Jobs, the same way they did 25 years ago to Bill Gates–and
pay a toll for the privilege of doing so to boot? Or will they
spend their time working to support more open platforms, such as
Android, where there will be less control, no toll booth, and
multiple channels of distribution? Haven’t they all been there
before?“Unfortunately, it appears that Steve Jobs has learned the wrong
lessons, and is fighting the last war rather than the current one.
Jobs failed in the early 1980s in large part because the IBM PC
platform provided what at the time was a remarkably open platform
for ISVs, as well as an ever-growing potential customer market as
more and more personal computer buyers flocked to the ‘WinTel’
platform instead of Tandy, Commodore–or Apple.