Back in 2004, in a previous incarnation of this blog, I wrote a small piece on how I believed that Apple was gradually losing their newfound ‘Open’ policy and returned to their ‘old’ practice of total control, a closed platform and proprietary technology. Like many others, I always believed, and still do, that Apple’s closed, monopolistic approach is one of the main reasons that caused their demise in the 1990s, and the reason why it may hinder the huge potential that its current hardware and software offerings have this decade. Tim O’Reilly puts it very succinctly in this late 2004 interview, when he describes how Apple promises computing ‘nirvana’ and lets economics and marketing screw it all.
