Matthew Ingram wrote a great piece that sums up Apple’s crisis of conscience when it comes to open software development. It’s worth a bit of discussion.

[Update: Apple is able to remotely deactivate software. I don't remember Nokia needing to do this with Symbian.]

As a disclaimer, I now have a Mac notebook. I like it, but it’s been a learning experience. For a Mac to work, you need to give yourself over to it completely. You don’t save pictures; you use iPhoto. You don’t save MP3s; you use iTunes. You don’t install Acrobat; you use Preview. And so on. Apple’s built these things itself because there were a limited number of options for the Mac, and because it can integrate them better.

For a long time, Microsoft won the desktop wars because they were “open” to applications. You could write whatever you wanted. Everyone chose a PC because that’s where all the games were, that’s where all the apps worked. Developers shunned the Mac.

Then two things happened.

• The Mac switched to Intel chipsets, allowing things like Parallels and dual booting to support Windows. Add a few networking drivers and support for Windows networking, and you had a respectable corporate citizen, at least for the marketing iconoclasts.
• Desktop variety became irrelevant with the Internet and SaaS.

These days, the desktop is arguably less good at everything — an aging jack-of-all-trades that can’t compete with consoles, tablets, PDAs, and so on. Desktops are good for workstation tasks like graphic design, but not much else.

Most of the world’s Internet devices aren’t computers. We live in a bit of a bubble in North America but the rest of the world already knows this. (I crunched population and cellphone ownership from the latest data I could find, because I’m a nerd, and the results are at right. Canada and the US are near the bottom.)

Don’t believe desktops are dull? Buy a new desktop and don’t connect it to anything. See how long it takes you to get bored. But plug it in, and wonderful things happen. You can use any app you want — through a browser. Desktop integration and user experience is what matters. Which means that the Mac environment (closed, but everything’s built in) trumps the Windows environment (open, but lots of registries and drivers and updates) for a connected world.

Apple gets this, which is the reason they’re stealthing their cloud client and Safari inside iTunes, much to everyone’s chagrin.) It’s also the reason they’re working on a game platform (a fact lots of people have told me but nobody will go on the record about.) They recognize that integrated user experiences is their strength.

And to deliver the best, most integrated experience, you need a closed system. Phones are a case in point: They require a higher standard of stability, battery efficiency, and so on. The iPhone’s a software experience, and controlling that experience has been the key to Cupertino’s success. But now, forced to open things up a bit, it’s struggling.

There’s another crisis going on. Apple has vertically integrated a Mac user’s entire life, and can’t break that apart. No other company goes from hardware to content so well. Just look at the layers they control:

• Macbook, AppleTV, iPhone
• Mac OSX, iPhone OS
• iLife, iMail, iPhoto, pretty much i-anything
• .Mac and MobileMe
• iTunes store for music and video
• iTunes store

This makes for a great user experience, until you want to step outside that box. Then the designers lose control over elegance, and the accountants lose control over revenue.

Apple has to figure out whether it wants to hang on to that revenue cake, or eat Microsoft’s client lunch. It can’t do both.