here is another view to walled Garden.
People might believe that a wallet garden as a app store monopoly will not work, because regardless what Apple will try, they need the consumer and at the end a consumer can drive a lot. Consumers did not like Netflix’s price change and Netflix did feel it.
If Apple tries to keep the boundaries too close then the innovation will suffer.
Right now it helps Apple to keep the playfield closed to keep a lot of spam, virus etc out. And Apple did need to build the walled garden, because without this, the iPad would not have succeeded, as we can see with android tablets or before with netbooks which don’t have any success yet or are already dead.
We see more and more hacker attacks, this costs companies a lot of money and the consumer will lose faith. Recent examples are Sony or some Credit Card companies, which got hacked, in the last view months. Sony even could not get their system for months running - the online gamers were all, but happy.
With the ipad, users can very easy install thousands of software with a click. Apple need to keep the system very tied, that the user experience does not suffer otherwise the iPad would have been no success.
Apple is moving completely to Internet install, which we can see with the missing SuperDrive in the new products. And therefore no chance to use a DVD to install, but Apple is progressive and drives many times new ways to do things. They started to leave the floppy out of the computer and later the CD. Then they started to make phones without keyboard. All the time people were questioning, but now it is common not to have floppy or phones without keyboard.
Apple tries with the ipad the xbox principle - Easy to use, great design and innovative and extreme good pricing.
The MacBook Air is a different story. It is much faster than the ipad and a little bigger, kind of mobile but higher in price and still not scalable to not to interfere with the MacBook Pro and to keep the MacBook Pro in game. Maybe they learned with iphone and ipod. The ipod is almost dead, because of the iphone.
A big advantage is the Apple app store which other companies are now trying and actually Microsoft had it with Windows Vista before even Apple started with the app store, but nobody had such a good payment model for developers that Apple has now a big advantage. If we compare it with the Google app store, then we can see that most of the android downloads a free and revenue is much less than with Apple. One reason is, that Google does not control enough the store and the OS distribution. Developers have much harder to develop apps for Androids because testing will take forever. And the quality of apps are so bad (because nobody controls the app submission that users don't want to pay for the apps at google because the quality might be bad.
There used to be Digital River for buying apps online, before we had mobile app stores, but is was a mess and not easy to find apps. Apple reinvented software distribution and they did it really good.
I think Apple found the right riming. We are ready for centralized apps. Consumers knew this from Facebook or even from SalesForce, both have a big app platform.
I don’t think that Apple really wants to get rich with software or with financial companies because it is not their core business. Apple uses software to support their services and hardware. But even if so, if the money is too much, then the developers will go away. And if they go away Apple needs and will change their methodology. Again, it does not matter how big Apple get, at the end the developers and consumer will regulate the power of Apple.
I think the fight is on between Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft all want to have the consumer and mid size companies and offer a 360 degree service - Microsoft with Office 365, Google with Google docs and apps etc.
Microsoft developed with Windows 365 and Windows 7 a great office pack, Google is totally concentrating on advertisement, Amazon on e-commerce and Apple will take the usability ticket. All of them are similar and totally different and therefore all of them will coexist.
However the big loser might be the Mainframe companies (metapher) like Oracle, IBM, SAP, HP etc. They might concentrate too much on the large cooperation till they figure out it is over, and that even the large companies moved to smaller data centers etc in clusters.
I believe Microsoft will move more and more into large companies and Apple will take the small and midsize market. Google will dominate in young start ups which eventual will grow very big.
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