The key to Apple’s success: The walled garden

“At the very end of July, an event popped up on the horizon: Apple was set to become the first trillion-dollar company in U.S. history. Standard Oil, the Ford Motor Company, U.S. Steel — companies like these, integral to American commerce, had never approached the mark,” Casey Johnston writes for The Outline. “Instead, it would be a corporation responsible for profoundly reshaping the way Americans interact with each other, a development as meaningful as the discovery of oil or automobiles.”
“Apple’s valuation said more about the state of the economy and business, particularly since its valuation has fluctuated and receded since the company hit its peak value,” Johnston writes. “But I think it’s meaningful that Apple got there before the other four or five companies currently terrorizing American consumers.”
“What Apple has created — and the rest of these companies have not, despite their efforts — is the key to its success, though we hate to admit it: the walled garden. What’s funny is that for all of the flack Apple has taken for building its walled garden — criticism that lunged from chiding and superior (‘You’ll never achieve market dominance that way’) to enraged and condemning (‘What right do you have to prevent people from putting whatever apps and music they want on their phones?’ — it worked, and worked so well that Apple never even needed to achieve market dominance to become the nation’s most valuable company ever,” Johnston writes. “But the grand irony to the walled garden is that while it’s largely paid off, becoming such a large part of the world means Apple can no longer keep it out. It’s impossible to proactively manage anything that large, but app developers have become increasingly brazen about pulling tricks on Apple’s customers and, by extension, Apple itself.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Certainly Apple needs to do a better job policing bad actors in the App Store, but, when you consider the sheer size of the thing, they’ve actually done a pretty decent job overall.