Honestly, I stopped reading after the first few paragraphs. "The iPhone has taken the world by storm." We know. "The Apple AppStore is not an ecosystem and it's not a new market where companies can participate freely." We know. "So why do I think Apple has created the modern equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits?" Let me guess... because of the App store gatekeeping? "So Apple controls the gateway to even offer an application to the market." Bingo!
I'm not trying to be condescending, but these points have been beaten to death on HN already, right down to barking "Just open the iPhone for third-party developers and allow other application stores," which, while it gives me warm fuzzies, is just clearly not something Apple is willing to do without serious forethought. Why not add something novel to the debate?
Apple is the new Apple. This is the way Apple has always been. Apple is the original closed box consumer platform. It's part of the company's DNA, if there is such a thing. The only difference is that now they also control the distribution channel, not just the hardware/OS.
I think that's stretching the point. The Apple II was certainly not closed. Literally the whole design of the thing was cleanly documented, right down the IC selection and the (hand assembled!) firmware. The original Mac was likewise an open book (albeit one without an expansion bus). Take a look at the first edition of Inside Macintosh. Even modern macs aren't "closed" in any meaningful sense. You can develop and deploy software for them using most or all of the tools Apple has internally.
And in any case, it's not the "closedness" that people are complaining about with regard to the iPhone; that's just the practical tool Apple is using. The complaint is about Apple's attempts to use dominance in one sector (smartphones in this case, though I think a similar argument can be made about media players and iTunes) as leverage against competitors or to favor its own products, or those of its allies.
And it is that behavior that seems very Microsoft-like to those of us who remember the 90's.
"Apple is the new Microsoft" is just more easily sold way of saying "Apple is the new Evil(TM)".
Microsoft has been a horizontal monopoly. Apple has large horizontal and vertical reach but has cleverly avoided being a monopoly of either sort. This doesn't mean Apple hasn't been evil but at least when Apple is evil, there's an alternative...
Just so someone says it I hope everyone remembers Microsoft had a monopoly with Windows. Apple doesn't with the iPhone. The most optimistic estimate puts the number of iPhones sold by the end of 2009 at 45 million. Compare that to an estimated 4.3 billion cell phone users worldwide and 260 million U.S. users alone.
Including the iPhone in the 4.3 billion worldwide phones is like including PCs in electric typewriter sales; sure they can do some of the same things, but they're clearly different products.
> They have a monopoly on non-horrible smartphones
That's like saying, "Arby's has a monopoly on good-tasting fastfood." You can't have a monopoly on being the best at something. Just because you think that the iPhone is the best phone on the market doesn't mean that you can claim that Apple has a monopoly just because you don't like their competitor's products. (Well, you can -- freedom of speech and all -- but you're wrong)
There's nothing, certainly not any behavior by Apple, preventing anyone from coming up with an equally non-horrible smartphone. The closest they've come is by buying the quantity of flash memory they have.
People writing tired, repetitive, biased articles ad-nauseum while over-emphasising the negative qualities of the company while under-emphasising the positives?
I'm not trying to be condescending, but these points have been beaten to death on HN already, right down to barking "Just open the iPhone for third-party developers and allow other application stores," which, while it gives me warm fuzzies, is just clearly not something Apple is willing to do without serious forethought. Why not add something novel to the debate?