A Canadian on Wall Street

Bruce Schneier writes about the increasingly popular phenomenon of lock-in. From a business standpoint, this probably makes sense as a certain narrow-minded strategy, but it’s interesting to see, at least in the case of Apple, how it mirrors their old attitude of not allowing clones of their hardware. In fact, the iPhone lock-in strategy is business as usual at Apple, which some people have pointed to as their strength — they are one of the premier non-open source software companies, and that vise-grip they have on development stands in sharp contrast to Microsoft, which has an equally negative view towards open source. It helps that, at least for the moment, Steve Jobs is at the helm and is in sync with the wants of the consumer public — but that situation is always tenuous, in my view. Don’t forget, not that long ago the Apple was producing G3 Cubes and wondering why people weren’t snapping them up.