While the antitrust spotlight has long been pointed at Google, the company that really has to watch its step is Apple. Beginning in the 1980s, Apple’s Steve Jobs left behind Apple’s original open design and began to champion a “closed”—or as the firm prefers, an “integrated”—approach to computing and entertainment delivery. This fact is familiar to any Apple user. Apple’s products are designed to work well with humans, other Apple stuff, and, at a distant third, other companies. “Foreign attachments” to the Apple system are sometimes accepted, but never quite loved.
Contrary to what devoted “openists” might suggest, there are some advantages to Apple’s approach. Products engineered to work together often work better, if only because the firm’s engineers have more information. An Apple engineer building an application for the iPhone knows much more than someone programming an App for all the phones Android runs on. Moreover, to its credit, Apple isn’t an integration purist, like AT&T in the 1950s. Apple runs standard protocols like WiFi, allows outside Apps on the iPhone, and hasn’t tried to reinvent the World Wide Web. You might say that a clever, nuanced balancing of open and closed is Apple’s real secret.
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