In an interview with Apple COO Tim Cook about 4th quarter earnings, a question was posed about iPhone sales. Cook disclosed that over 1.4 million iPhones had been sold, surpassing Apple's goal of 1 million sales. This increase in sales can be heavily attributed to Apple's recent price cut, showing how price elastic consumers are. The more interesting fact is that Apple estimates that 250,000 of those sales were bought with the "intention to unlock".
That's 1 in 6 sales with the intent to unlock Apple's Firmware. Wow. If that's not a statement for open platforms, nothing is. For the past few years, we've seen a big push for open source/open platforms, as made evident by user created content. With the explosion of Wikipedia, Blogging, customized portal homepages, API's (Google and Facebook), society is moving more and more towards open platforms. Users want the ability to customize their content, and many are willing to jump through hoops to do so.
While newer companies such as Google and Facebook are embracing this trend, older companies such as Apple and Microsoft are struggling to hold onto their proprietary innovations. Over the next few years, companies will have to open up their platforms to survive amongst this new age of prosumers.
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