But as long as you’re taking me to task for supposed inaccuracies, let me take you to task for a few of the weaker items in your comment.

You said “Apple waited too long to open up the Mac platform but it was not Jobs’ doing, he left Apple in 1985.”

My point was that Jobs never did open up the Mac, he wanted it closed and proprietary from the beginning. Sure, it was other CEOs that continued that policy for many years–but once they belated opened the Mac up, Jobs shut the program down as soon as he returned. Every opportunity he had, he kept it closed. I stick my my original statements and conclusions.

You said “The IBM PC was not really ‘open’.” Sure it was. It wasn’t because IBM WANTED it to be per se, but they let it be by using standard off the shelf components, and stupidly allowing Microsoft to sell MS DOS to other manufacturers. I never said why it was open–just that it was. And it certainly was. The fact that someone had to backward engineer one component (the BIOS) is kind of a weak argument to say it wasn’t open.

Also, while the x86 architecture hadn’t yet reached dominance back then, it had already taken a huge lead. My feeling is that Jobs/Apple chose something else feeling they HAD to be different and not do business with the MS/Intel enemy, not because the Motorola 68x series was superior.

You say that the original Mac wasn’t a huge seller, but in comparing it to current day iPod sales you are being a bit disingenuous. It’s silly to compare PC volumes in 1985 (at much higher price points at the time, especially) to a much lower cost consumer product in 2007. It’s apples to oranges, no pun intended. I will agree that the iPod is a much bigger hit today than the Mac was in it’s time–that’s a fair statement. But the orginal Mac WAS a hit. I was never trying to contrast levels of success between the Apple products in this post–just show the similarities in strategy over a long period of time.

You make some good points on the iPod and iTunes–but in fairness–I stated that there are some signs of openness in that system, relative to the other examples. And I really disagree with you that it’s “over” in music players. This is still a very young market, with lot of change and innovation to come. 6 years is nothing–do you think music is going away anytime soon? It’s been here a while and changed alot. I don’t know how old you are. You’ve either got a few years on you or have studied your history of computing. But I remember when IBM was absolutely DOMINANT in PCs–all computing for that matter. It wasn’t really all that long ago. Apple still has plenty of time to squader the Music Player market. Maybe that won’t–they got a great lead. But go back and study some more computing history on companies with positions easily as dominant as Apple currently is in music, in their markets: Lotus, WordPerfect, Ashton-Tate, Novell, ray, WANG, DEC and a long list of others. They either have ceased to exist, or are a skinny shadow of their former selves. Will Apple keep their dominant position in MUSIC? This is the technology business. Too soon to tell–it really is early.

Apple waited too long to open up the Mac platform but it was not Jobs’ doing, he left Apple in 1985. He was not the CEO by the way, it was John Sculley, who considered licensing the Mac OS but backed out of the idea. The first Mac clones appeared in 1995, Jobs didn’t return before 1997 and ended the ill-fated program. Apple was not in good shape and the opportunity was past. Nowadays the Mac is not really mainstream, yet it grows at multiple times the market growth.

The IBM PC was not really ‘open’. The BIOS was proprietary, the cloners reverse engineered it to produce the first IBM compatible systems. The clone market took off because Microsoft was allowed to sell MS-DOS to other manufacturers. The clones took IBM by surprise. Later, IBM introduced PS/2, the OS/2 operating system, etc, to recapture the market with its proprietary technologies, but it was too late, by that time Windows 3.0 was bundled with PC clones.

The x86 architecture was not as prevalent as you think in the 1980s. The Motorola 68k was widely used: Apple, Sinclair, Tandy, Atari and Commodore Amiga personal computers, and let’s not forget the Apollo, Sun and SGI workstations… The choice of the PowerPC in 1994 is far more debatable, the other platforms (Atari, Amiga, etc) had already disappeared and the PC clones running on x86 processors were now ubiquitous. But Jobs had nothing to do with the decision. The transition to Mac OS X, which is easily portable, finally opened the door to the Intel switch.

The original Mac wasn’t a huge seller. Jobs’ stated objective before launch was to sell 2 million Macs by the end of 1985. According to Owen Linzmayer’s book Apple Confidential, it took until September 1985 to sell 500,000 Macs. (In 1985, Mac sales slowed down from the first year.) Apple didn’t reach the one million mark until March 1987 and the 2 million mark until 1988. By then, Steve Jobs was long gone. The Mac finally found its niche, mostly in education and desktop publishing, but its worldwide market share never exceeded 12 percent.

Thus, the Mac is in no way comparable to the iPod, which is extraordinarily successful in its market (over 100 million iPods sold since fall 2001, 70 percent market share among portable music players in the U.S.). Ditto for iTunes (several hundred million users, the vast majority on Windows PCs) and the iTunes Store (staggering market share, several billion songs downloaded).

I don’t think it’s so early in the game, the first iPod was unveiled 6 years ago. The legal download market is still young, but it doesn’t really matter, the iPod is far more lucrative than music downloads. The system was never completely closed, most iPod owners still load their entire music library, ripped from their own CDs or downloaded from p2p services, on their iPod. Going forward many music stores will start selling DRM-free music.

I’m kinda worried about the exclusive partnership with AT&T;, on the other hand it will really boost Apple’s bottom line. The carrier will pay Apple a monthly fee for every iPhone customer, and AT&T; won’t meddle with the interface of Apple’s cellphones nor with the user experience. Apple sold 9.8 million iPods this quarter, and 270,000 iPhones in the first 30 hours of sales. They expect to reach the 1 million mark by September. Other models will be introduced to sustain the momentum.

All in all, I don’t agree with your take that a closed approach often works for a while but then backfires. It didn’t happen with the Mac (not a huge seller to begin with), nor with the iPod (still the leader by a wide margin after 6 years in the market). The openness of the PC platform is a strange quirk of history (but it democratized personal computing). And some of the strategic choices are wrongly attributed to Steve Jobs in your article. But it was still a good read.