I fear the world got lucky in that the Internet inherited its openness from academia, and the PC inherited its openness from the early hobbyist microcomputer scene. As in many other industries, openness - except when necessary for a bare minimum of interoperability - has never really been the norm in consumer electronics. As computing moves beyond the PC, I think that (sadly) we are going to have to get used to proprietary platforms and their attendant pricing shenanigans.
Unfortunately for companies moving beyond the PC, the genie is out of the bottle already.
Phones have been historically locked down by carriers. Taking a look at the alternatives from just 5 years ago, the iPhone looks pretty damn open. And there is a reason for that, and why consumers didn't care.
Consumers are used to phones being locked, but consumers are also used to doing whatever they want with the computers they've bought. And funny thing - this wasn't always the case. IBM-compatible PCs that you could extend with ISA cards, assemble your own, coming bundled with MS-DOS / Windows - weren't the first PCs available. Even Apple came after Atari. And those home computers back in those day were pretty locked.
What changed the scene is the simple fact that software is so much bigger and more profitable than hardware; and there are many forces in the market that want hardware to be an unlocked and cheap complementary to software. You can see that playing right now with the battle between Android / WinMo 7 / iOS / Blackberry.
That's the biggest reason why Microsoft won in the 90's - not only over Apple, but also over IBM's OS/2 - they made no discrimination when it came to hardware, they ensured backwards-compatibility for third-party software at all costs, they kept the SDK free of charge. Compared to IBM's OS/2 ; Windows was a piece of shit ... but it ran fine on 286 processors and was compatible with everything you wanted.
My phone has at least ten times the horsepower of my first computer. I had no expectations out of my Nokia 3310; as I only expected it to make phone calls.
Bottom line - computing doesn't move beyond the PC, but towards the PC.
And Apple is increasingly becoming aggressive because they'd like to keep the grip they have right now, but they also realize that they cannot do it. Want to bet that they'll lose costumers to Android if for example Kindle for iOS is shut down?
(Nitpick: I'm aware IBM compatibles weren't the first PCs available. Before them came, among others, the Apple II and the Commodore - both of which came with full schematics in the back of the manual. That's openness if you ask me.)
With the people I've dealt with who aren't in the tech scene, modifying a computer is black magic. Openness is... not desired. What they want is a consumer appliance. Like a TV.
Didn't quite use to be that way. Computer users seemed to be at least a little geek, and wouldn't totally flip at installing a video card. At least in my experience.
So I say, screw the closed systems, I'll keep my PCs and read source code, I'll deep link to web sites from my blogs.
It's not just about users being able to install video cards or whatever. You as a developer are going to have a harder time inventing the next email or WWW or Google or Netflix or Twitter, if your potential users are all using closed platforms rather than open ones.
Indeed, there was always a big contrast between the telecom world (closed) and the PC world (open). As these are merging now, I hope the openness won't be sacrificed. I really hope we can prevent that from happening. It's one of the things that makes the internet a really great place for innovation.
It's not just telecom either. Game consoles have always been closed. And we are starting to see apps running on TVs, in cars, and other places that definitely do not have the history of openness that the PC does.
