The comparison between what Microsoft wrought in the 1980s and what Google was trying to do in 2010 was not exact,but it was close enough to be unsettling -- and infuriating.It exemplified the great debate of the digital age: closed versus open, or as Jobs framed it, integrated versus fragmented.Was it better, as Apple believed and as Jobs's own controlling perfectionism almost compelled,to tie the hardware and software and content handling into one tidy system that assured a simple user experience?Or was it better to give users and manufacturers more choice and free up avenues for more innovation,by creating software systems that could be modified and used on different devices?"Steve has a particular way that he wants to run Apple,and it's the same as it was twenty years ago, which is that Apple is a brilliant innovator of closed systems," Schmidt later told me."They don't want people to be on their platform without permission. The benefits of a closed platform is control.But Google has a specific belief that open is the better approach, because it leads to more options and competition and consumer choice."
