Apple wants to be both a publisher and the builder of the platform This is hardware-scarcity thinking. My hypothesis is that our industry is so entrained to th

Apple wants to be both a publisher and the builder of the platform This is hardware-scarcity thinking. My hypothesis is that our industry is so entrained to think like this that it's going to take a decade to settle in to our new universe. It's going to be like when the mainframe folks had to come to grips with the PC. We are going to be awash in tablets within a year. Within five years we will be picking them out of the trash. Platforms are a commodity now. I can buy a Windows laptop -- not a netbook, a 15" laptop -- for a few hundred bucks from my local Micro Center. Netbooks are even cheaper, of course. As for operating systems? The Linux revolution has arrived. Android has arrived and it is open-source. If you want to run your own platform you need to download Android and pay some Chinese manufacturing firm a few hundred bucks per unit to cough out a tablet or a generic smartphone and stick your nameplate on it. And if this isn't true now, it will be true in a year or two. I have a Flip Mino video camera. Its processing power is surely greater than that of the laptop I owned ten years ago. I am about to literally take the thing apart for parts because its resale value is too small to care and my new iPhone is going to be a factor of five more useful. When a hardware platform was a three thousand dollar investment we had to worry a lot about the manufacturer "dictating what it can be used for", because we couldn't afford more than one. The one we bought had to support everything we wanted to do, or we would be sad. When hardware platforms cost thirty dollars the calculus will change. What Apple has figured out is that when hardware is a commodity, editing and publishing is the name of the game. You're no longer competing to sell more hardware independent of content, just as Conde Nast is not a paper company. Your asset is taste. Design. The ability to ship hardware-software-content combos that consistently work and consistently make the customer happy.