Daveed

Microsoft Scared of iPhone Domination

I mostly agree with your points, but Apple is no angel when it comes to "open" vs. "proprietary". It's just that since the second coming of J. they've gotten quite competent at leveraging "open" infrastructure to boost their "proprietary" assets (like the iTunes store, the iPod connector, the middle and upper layers of MacOS X, etc.). You could say that while Microsoft goes the "embrace and extend" route, Apple goes the "embrace but wrap up" route. Both start off with "open" technology, and both end up with proprietary products.

Admittedly Microsoft's approach is more objectionable because its quasi-monopoly in desktop operating systems ends up polluting intrinsically open things (like public web pages) with non-open cruft (like IE-specific HTML). Apple's quasi-monopoly in the digital music commerce doesn't seem to have had an equivalent nefarious effect.