I thought you were going to go with the “General Store” analogy where Mr Ike (remember the Waltons?) would be behind the counter. You would go the counter with your mom’s list and he would get everything for you. No real choice in manufacturer of flour, or sugar, or even fabric. You bought what he bought, and brought.

Then we had the advent of the supermarket. You, the consumer, could now peruse from a vast array of similar products, deciding which ones of the myriad choices was right for you. Let’s take my favorite example: tomato paste. You want Heinz? Hunts? Giant store brand? Great Value? You want 4 oz? 8? 16? 32? The killer 64 oz? The assortment just of tomato based products is staggering–yet all choices we have.

Our choices remain limited by that which Walmart, or Giant, or Wegman’s chooses to stock, but (at least in the 2 former cases) they are limited by fiscal and physical constraints, and not some artistic and aesthetic focus.

If you don’t like the choices at one grocery store, you can simply go to another.

Apple is somewhere between these. They aren’t limiting us to only one choice (but oh happy day if we only could be annoyed by one fart app instead of 300!)

Apple however does limit choice. They not only control the store, but they won’t let you go to another store (without forcing you to make ‘unauthorized changes” to your device. Now, I hear the response–”you can go to another store–get a different phone!” But that’s not really the same.

In the analogy of the grocery store I have a device that I use to consume a product (my stomach, and all pertinences attached thereto). I am able to choose between a selection of products that I consume, but the device of consumption stays the same.

In the Apple model, I am forced to forgo a consumption device (one that might have a large number of appealing factors) for the “option” to consume a different assortment of products.

I don’t see why it has to be “either, or.” This Cartesian Anxiety must stop. Tell us that we are “safest” if we shop in the company store. But let us choose (perhaps through an “opt in” feature that won’t cause nightmares with firmware updates) to choose a different store. Let the consumer decide on the risks of consumption, while allowing us to have the same consumption device.

Does Apple not have the “Stomach” for that?

Walled garden specifically means a service which refuses to operate with other services. A vertical stack of software. Vertical being creation/production->shipping->operation. Think of hollywood. Congress broke up companies with vertical stacks of production and distribution to create competition. Apple writes closed stacks, only ever opening the creation/production. So other people can write software that produces content into Apple’s vertical stack.

Nothing about a vertical stack, per se, causes a monopoly. Only the inability to compete with the stack creates the monopoly. Competition, and losing, is what has been happening lately. The good news is that Apple is not a content creator. They create the stack. People have to create content to fill the stack. That is the difference from AOL – who was the sole producer. Sure AOL bought content to add, but no one person could add to the greater whole. Apple is just acting as censor. Apple is opt-in. Choice is ours.

The Good Thing(tm) is that content creators can choose to create both for Apple and other platforms like Android, and the web in general.

I know that not everyone is a fan of Linux, but I think this is an example of a model that takes the best of Apple’s design but frees it from Apple’s obsessive control. Yes, Apple has done the best interface design (overall) anywhere in computing. But do I want Apple to decide what I can access without any ability to “opt out” or “opt in” to other choices? That is the surest road to a monopoly–and when we’re talking about the ipad as the primary vector for our media content, a monopoly is pretty scary to me. Don’t we think it’s a *bad* idea when all of the newspapers are owned by the same company?