Is Steve Jobs Big Brother?

Is Steve Jobs Big Brother? - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com (June 1, 2010, 9:00 PM Robert Wright)

No wonder Jobs’s detractors have been making ironic reference to Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl ad, the one that implicitly cast the IBM-Microsoft alliance as Big Brother.

One tech journalist puts the fear this way: “I don’t want a single, Wal-Mart-like channel that controls access to my audience and dictates what is and is not acceptable material for me to create.” It’s not a crazy fear, given that some industry analysts think Apple wants to become “the Internet’s cable TV company” ― turning its iMachines into the dominant distributors of print, video and audio.

Still, it’s an unwarranted fear. The nature of the digital landscape makes it hard to be both a control freak and a global hegemon. And Jobs’s history suggests that he’ll choose control over power.

Rewind the tape to that 1984 ad. It heralded the coming of the Macintosh operating system, which was head and shoulders above anything Microsoft was offering. So why did Microsoft wind up dominating the operating system market? Because Jobs chose not to do what Microsoft did: license his operating system to computer makers.
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