Gatekeeping is Apple’s Brand Promise
Steve Sinofsky, former president of Microsoft’s Windows division and now a VC, has an excellent deep dive on the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). The Act is very squarely aimed at Apple, despite the fact that Apple is not a monopoly and has a significantly smaller share of the phone market than Android. Apple’s history is well known, in contrast with Microsoft it went for a closed system in which Apple controlled entry to a much greater extent. The same was true with iPhone versus Android.
iPhone was successful but it was not as successful as Android that came shortly after because of the constraints Steve put in place to be the best, not the highest share or the greatest number of units. Android was to smartphones just as Microsoft was to personal computers. Android sought out the highest share, greatest variety of hardware at the lowest prices, and most open platform for both phone makers and developers. By making Android open source, Google even out-Microsofted Microsoft by providing what hardware makers had always wanted—complete control. A lot more manufacturers, people, and companies appreciated that approach more than Apple’s. That’s why something like 7 out of 10 smartphones in the world run Android.
Android has the kind of success Microsoft would envy, but not Apple, primarily because with that success came most all the same issues that Microsoft sees (still) with the Windows PC. The security, privacy, abuse, fragility, and other problems of the PC show up on Android at a rate like the PC compared to Macintosh and iPhone. Only this time it is not the lack of motivation bad actors have to exploit iPhone, rather it is the foresight of the Steve Jobs vision for computing. He pushed to have a new kind of computer that further encapsulated and abstracted the computer to make it safer, more reliable, more private, and secure, great battery life, more accessible, more consistent, always easier to use, and so on. These attributes did not happen by accident. They were the process of design and architecture from the very start. These attributes are the brand promise of iPhone as much as the brand promise of Android is openness, ubiquity, low price, choice.
The lesson of the first two decades of the PC and the first almost two decades of smartphones are that these ends of a spectrum are not accidental. These choices are not mutually compatible. You don’t get both. I know this is horrible to say and everyone believes that there is somehow malicious intent to lock people into a closed environment or an unintentional incompetence that permits bad software to invade an ecosystem. Neither of those would be the case. Quite simply, there’s a choice between engineering and architecting for one or the other and once you start you can’t go back. More importantly, the market values and demands both.
That is unless you’re a regulator in Brussels. Then you sit in an amazing government building and decide that it is entirely possible to just by fiat declare that the iPhone should have all the attributes of openness.
Apple’s promise to iPhone users is that it will be a gatekeeper. Gatekeeping is what allows Apple to promise greater security, privacy, usability and reliability. Gatekeeping is Apple’s brand promise. Gatekeeping is what the consumer’s are buying. The EU’s DMA is an attempt to make Apple more “open” but it can only do so at the expense of turning Apple into Android, devaluating the brand promise and ironically reducing competition.
Read the whole thing for more details and history including useful comparisons with the US antitrust trial against Microsoft.