Stephen Withers
Thursday, 25 September 2008 13:56
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 4
Time magazine suggests Apple is making the same mistake with the iPhone that it did with computers. I say Time is the one making the mistake.
Regular readers will know that every now and again I feel the need to take up the cudgels against one of my colleagues (usually - though not always - from a different publication).
Every now and again, someone suggests that IBM did the right thing by adopting an open architecture, and Apple was wrong to take a proprietary route.
The latest example can be seen in a Time article called "
Google vs. iPhone: Is Steve Jobs Reliving Past Mistakes?", by Josh Quittner.
"The key to the PC's success and Apple's downfall was that the open-standards-based IBM-compatible PC created a platform for third-party hardware and softwaremakers to ply their stuff," wrote Quittner.
This makes it sound as if IBM made a conscious decision to adopt open standards. The way I remember it, IBM decided it needed to quickly develop a relatively low cost personal computer, and consequently used a lot of off-the-shelf technology from outside suppliers, including Intel's 8080 CPU and an operating system from Microsoft.
(Microsoft had to buy-in an OS after doing a deal with IBM, but that's another story.)
Consequently, IBM put relatively little of its own intellectual property into its PC, which left the door open to other companies.
How did the cloners do their thing? See
page two.
