Wow. I wasn't aware that Steve Jobs wrote essays. Are there more?
I think this part is interesting, because it's still true:
> Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.
I don't think this is as true as you think it is. If IBM locked down their PC platform in the 80s like Apple does now, then we wouldn't have Linux nor BSD and everyone would have lost.
Yeah, but Steve Jobs isn't responsible anymore for what Apple is doing today.
If he would have done much different, I don't know. I also guess his main concern with Flash was, that he couldn't control the proprietary plattform. The flash player could have been improved ... but Adobe would have been still in charge.
The problem was, essentially, a huge chunk of code in the middle of the browser experience that apple couldn't optimize for mobile CPUs, screens and batteries.
I know. Because Adobe could not bring themself to open the flash player (and still make money with selling their awesome tools). Thats why flash died, despite it was much more advanced than the web at that time.
The original IBM PC had pretty open hardware and software, both a little unintentional. Hardware-wise they published everything so add-in cards and more could be developed. Sofware-wise they didn't hold Microsoft to an exclusive agreement for PC-DOS so MS-DOS could come out.
Later they tried to close the barn door with very locked down hardware with the microchannel bus and IBM's own operating system OS/2. But it was too late...
I actually think Apple and their customers would be more successful with open hardware. When they went from powerpc to intel with more generally compatible hardware, I think that was great. Now they're reeling it back in, and I wonder if they'll be following the same path as IBM did...
Computer is always sort of open in that market segment. Apple ii, cpm and IBM PC. One can try (ps2) but all failed. Apple trying but still mac is sort of open and you can still run linux and windows on m1 sort of.
Phone ... smart phone opened? From Nokia, Newton, palmpilot, windows phone, ...
The question is whether the phone business model can bring it to desktop and conquer there. Wonder.
I like my phone is walled garden and I can take risk of my collections of pc.
I think 9to5 does a great job and few on twitter looking through every single detail of the released email in court with Epic vs Apple.
Those words of Steve might have been true back then. It is far from the truth today.
At least Apple no longer sees selling more devices as their primary motive. Remember when the App Store started, Steve thought it would be about the size of their iTunes Store.
I think this part is interesting, because it's still true:
> Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.