WIRED:The Apple chief has gambled that it is better to close yourself off from competition and create your own unique product, writes DANNY O'BRIEN

I SEE Apple chief executive Steve Jobs as a sort of visitor from another time. When he was brutally squeezed out of Apple, it was 1985 – just a year after the introduction of his brainchild, the Macintosh, which launched windows and mice on to a world used to clunky keyboard commands and green text on black screens.

Just over 10 years later, Jobs was finally welcomed back to Apple and in a few short months had executed an internal coup, seizing the chief executive slot once again.

But what happened in the years in between? Jobs didn’t exactly slack. He started another computer company, NeXT, which made niche but influential academic and scientific machines.

He also bought animation studio Pixar from George Lucas and launched it on the path to becoming the cinematic and creative giant it is today.

But in his time away from Apple, Jobs missed a revolution or two: the rise of the internet and the spread of open source, the free and open community-written software movement.

The new Apple handles both the internet and open source better than many companies. Its original online web store, based on an old NeXT web-based system, was and continues to be one of the best on the planet. Its web browser, Safari, evolved from an open-source project to which Apple still contributes.

But it would be hard to say that either the internet or free software is burned into Apple’s DNA – the way it is for, say, Google. Google and companies that followed in its wake see the internet as their environment and free software as something to be encouraged. Both the internet and free software lower transaction costs and barriers to entry to such an extent that eventually all businesses are only just making a profit.

The business model of Google is to pile up those tiny profits and scale aggressively.

Google won because it was better at scaling. It also won because rapid commoditisation has a way of eating away at your most dangerous competition.

Everyone who thought they had a business model for the information age quickly learned that the value of information dropped as the internet spread.

Even Microsoft’s core products, Windows and Office, were in danger of being commoditised away.

Then, just as this process was beginning to hollow out Google’s most significant competition, the man from the past showed up.

When Jobs rejoined Apple in 1997, the company did not have a business model to lose. It was weeks away from going bust and had to take money and assurances from Microsoft to scrape by. Its hardware and software wasn’t even popular enough for anyone to commoditise it, apart from a few clone manufacturers quickly disposed of by Jobs.

But it was as though Jobs’s strategy had not changed since 1985. In that first year of the Mac, Jobs had argued against making the product open: you could not even expand the RAM in the first Mac. Jobs pushed not to have any external connectors either. He adopted the same strategy with the iPod, the iPhone and even Apple’s laptop range.

Jobs gambled that, rather than work with the traditions of the internet and open source, where you are open and co-operate with others to build better tools, it is better to close yourself off from the competition and create your own closed, unique product.

But it’s not as if Microsoft and the rest wanted to be commoditised. Microsoft tried to ignore the internet until it almost destroyed the company. Simply walking away from the fight isn’t going to save you.

What Jobs has created is not a walled garden, as others before him attempted. He has built a garden, and waited to see who wanders in, and how.

It is hard to believe that the iPod, iPhone and now the iPad are really under such direct control of Apple, because they take such advantage of the rest of the open world. Apple’s Safari browser is one of the best ways to view the web. The iPhone is far more open than its predecessors in the smartphone world.

But such windows to the outside hide Apple’s careful protection against having its control taken from it. Last month, Apple announced it was suing HTC, the main Taiwanese manufacturer of Android phones, for patent violations.

When Jobs announced the new iPhone operating system last week, he made it clear that only Apple-approved software would run on the iPhone and iPad. The company also added a phrase to its contract with applications developers, requiring that they do not use other companies’ software to create their programs.

Patent battles are viewed with horror by most contemporary engineers, who were raised in the patent ceasefires of the web era. To have to pay to develop on a platform, and to have restrictions on what you can use to do so, is an imposition unheard of, and impossible, in the open prairie of the internet. Avoiding such limits are exactly why open-source licences are written.

The internet is full of sound and fury that Jobs has taken this step. But it is his back yard. It is the place he has wanted ever since Macintosh set its pirate flag up against Microsoft and IBM. And he is not going to let anyone take it away from him again – even if he has to stand against the rest of the world, and two decades of technological revolution.