Steve Jobs: Architecture, Platforms, and the Big Picture

by Ken Orr

But Jobs's strengths are also his weaknesses. Jobs is the poster boy for closed architectures. Don't let this leak out, but Steve Jobs is a control freak. He wants to control every single element of every single component within his domain. One of the reasons that the Macintosh lost out to the PC was that Jobs was not comfortable opening up the architecture of the Macintosh so that other people could create innovative products that work on the same platform. Now with the iPhone, Jobs is doing it again.