Steve Jobs: “Open Systems Don’t Always Win”

Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, is unapologetic about Apple’s "closed" or "curated" approach, which is to tightly control how everything integrates from the chips to the software to the industrial design.

“Open versus closed is a smokescreen,” he argues. “Google likes to characterize Android as open and iOS as closed. We think this is disingenuous,” says Jobs.

The real difference between the iPhone and Android is, he says, “integrated versus fragmented."

There is some merit to that re-framing of the argument, though some will consider it a sophisticated bit of semantic gymnastics. Up to this point, Apple has been the salient exception to the "rule" that open approaches lead to more, and faster innovation.

But that is starting to change in the media business and with the rise of applications and closed user communities on the Internet. These days, in the content business, the options are "open," "closed" and "curated," which is another way of saying "fragmented," "integrated" or "annotated."

Steve Jobs: “Open Systems Don’t Always Win”: