> True, but can you recall any moment in history, where market forces did not actually make producing "open" devices unprofitable? I'd say that the early era o

> True, but can you recall any moment in history, where market forces did not actually make producing "open" devices unprofitable? I'd say that the early era of personal computers proved it. The Apple II and IBM PC were very open platforms-- thoroughly documented, developer friendly and made with very few parts you couldn't buy out of your favourite electronics distributor catalogue. They were riotous successes in large part because the open platform meant they didn't have to guess or corral the entire market. Remember that most of the killer apps of the era (VisiCalc, WordPerfect, dBase, 1-2-3, etc.) were third party, and it was largely aftermarket firms selling "six-in-one" cards, Sound Blasters, and Hercules graphics cards that patched the gaping holes in the PC's hardware design. Conversely, look at a machine like the TI-99/4 series: while on paper a decent machine for the time, it was as "closed" as a machine of the era could be: an unusually limited built-in development platform, and many of the desirable upgrades involved buying a very expensive expansion chassis. It's interesting to consider what the business tradeoffs of today's walled garden model are. Apple could choose to do a "pure hardware" play, or emulate the early 1980s IBM, where they offered some popular software via their own product line as a trusted source. The result would probably be a marginally larger total addressable market, as it would bring some customers and developers to the platform who needed something that could never clear the App Store before. But would the growth in market size compensate for the reduction in the average cut they can command from the market?