In this piece, Charlie Kindel responds to Horace Dediu’s article, Why doesn’t anybody copy Apple?. The answer he comes up with is surprisingly simple, but it does seem to explain the incentives that drive the overall behavior of Apple, and a range of its competitors.

John Gruber points out that this theory explains the difference in the success of the NeXT technology before and after that technology and team moved to Apple.

I think it also explains why Apple was able to enter and dominate the mobile phone industry in such a short amount of time. Before Apple’s entry into that market, the core customers for companies making mobile phone hardware (at least in the US) were the carriers, who exerted considerable control over the features and specifications of mobile phones sold for their networks.