<<Apple is one of the sad stories of proprietary
nature just like AOL>>
Apple is a story of a series of innovations and operating systems that were proprietary, leading them to several attractive market niches, that were allowed to scatter to the four winds. Missed opportunities to license, consistently too high pricing, vertical integration when manufacturing was not their strategic strength, and loss of management focus all contributed to allowing them to become marginal. Even their stronghold in graphic arts now seems in danger of sliding away. Sad, but the fault was not due to their innovations being proprietary.
Microsoft, on the other hand, built on their momentum and market share relentlessly, licensed freely, stayed out of hardware manufacturing to concentrate on software, and kept pricing down where only a stubborn few even tried to butt heads with them for operating systems.
Yet what is Microsoft.? An open system? Nope. It's as proprietary as they come. And has a dominant market share. And now they dictate the market standards.
I leave it to you to decide which of the above businesses AOL most closely resembles. Watch for announcements that AOL is taking on local ISP partners, who will function as "affiliates". Watch for a continuation of predatory pricing and market share pursuit that demoralizes the competition. And eventually, it should pay off. Economies of scale and ancillary income streams that the competition cannot get to, because they won't have the numbers of users, nor can they rip them away from AOL merely using price competition.
Incidentally, for an example of a management doing a steady and crafty development of a proprietary standard, against long odds, check out Qualcomm.
All IMO....
"Joe CDMA"
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