Customers buy into visions, not products. The iPhone is successful because it's both a great vision and a great product. In its time, Windows was a great vision, at least from the perspective of the people who signed off the budget for buying Windows PCs. Gruber is right that open vs. closed has nothing much to do with it.
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.
While I agree with the rest of your comment (esp the tl;dr), I completely disagree with the above. It's always about the product. Think of every recent Apple ad you've ever seen and ask yourself if they're showcasing the product or some nebulous 'vision'.
People who sign off on budgets don't get lauded because they bought into a 'vision'. It's because product X fits their requirement and likely solves a problem.
Vision, from the perspective of someone about to part with cold hard cash, isn't much of a factor.
OK, I may have phrased that badly. By "product" I meant simply the physical item itself and by "vision" I meant "what that thing can do for you". It's possible to make a beautiful, well-designed and all-round awesome product that's still useless because it doesn't actually fit any real use-case that potential customers might have.
That makes more sense to me now. I lump that all together in 'product' whereas vision is more about where a company is going and what philosophy is driving it (if you get my meaning).
It is possible to have customers who purchase based on vision/direction but this pretty much the defining characteristic of 'innovators' [1], who are willing to take risks on unfinished or poorly supported products.
After reading this I felt like I had been subjected to a 10 minute shrieking rant by an Apple fanboy. By the end I hardly cared what he was saying, I just wanted it to STOP!
If by article you mean Gruber then yes. If you meant Tim Wu's article then you didn't read the same one I did, he says unequivocally that barring magic pixie dust, closed loses.
I'm not arguing that closed wins because Apple is successful. I'm saying Tim Wu's underlying argument is a complete non sequitur and that is more effectively exposed with 35 words than 3,500.
TL;DR Gruber says "open vs closed" isn't really useful for determining commercial success.
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?"
> > Apple, in contrast, always treats itself better. (Try removing iTunes from your iPhone.)
> 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.
Try putting a different browser renderer on Firefox OS. You're pretty much locked in to JavaScript — unless you can somehow build WebKit with Emscripten, you're already behind what iOS can do — even with Apple's rules.
In Firefox OS, the browser is the OS. It'd be like saying you can't replace Dalvik in Android.
It's not about replacing the browser, it's about being able to replace things that you should be able to. There is no good technical reason to not let people replace Safari on iOS.
Not so sure about your last sentence. Can a replacement browser be any good without using JIT compilation somewhere? Is the sandbox going to allow it to jump into dynamically generated data? Are there any valid technical reasons for having sand-boxing in the first place?
It's kind of funny because for the most part I think Gruber proved the point of his article. BUT I think he also proved another point as well, that history is repeating itself and the IPhone might be in trouble. Not in trouble as in people will stop buying it or it will not be a top phone. But in trouble as in it will never dominate the smartphone market again. It may lead at some point but not dominate. This paragraph really pointed it out to me
"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.
Open-Closed is classic Innovators Solution stuff. When products aren't satisfactory for customers, vertically integrated companies can optimize better. When products improve to exceed customer satisfaction, open ecosystems let new companies combine components in new ways to serve new customer expectations.
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.
That's pretty much Gruber's point - that open technologies/standards beat closed ones in the long run, but that "open vs closed" is nonsensical when applied to analyse company performance.
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.