In article ,
"bmoag" wrote:


Apple should be where Microsoft is now but Steve Jobs has to be considered
one of the dumbest f*iug businessman of all time for not opening up the
platform the way Microsoft and Intel did


Common wisdom, but arguable.

It was not Microsoft and Intel that opened the architecture -- this
proves the point I'm about to make.

It was IBM who opened up the architecture. But IBM didn't make all the
money from this decision. Microsoft and Intel did. That's the whole
point.

Apple's a hardware company. Allowing the Mac OS to run on anybody's
hardware would put them out of the hardware business.

Maybe they could have made money licensing the OS, maybe not. But having
a vertically integrated, proprietary HW/SW platform is an advantage when
trying to build a reliable computer that's easy for consumers to deal
with.

Can you imagine if clone automakers could hook up a Chevy chassis to a
Mitsubishi engine with Toyota brakes and a Ford interior? It wouldn't
work. The reliability issues would be causing fatal accidents left and
right.

When Apple did license clones in the 1990's, the competing hardware
makers took money right out of Apple's pocket. That's why when Jobs came
back to the company, the first thing he had to do was stop licensing the
OS, in order to save Apple from going out of business.