Dave Winer suggests that platforms controlled by any one company can’t be as successful or sustainable as the Internet:

The only platform that really works is a platform with no platform vendor, and that’s the Internet.

It’s nice to think that an open platform where no single company’s interests dominate can be successful, but the reality is that the Internet itself would never have moved beyond the domain of the most tech-savvy if companies hadn’t realized the economic potential of doing business online.

Most experts and analysts agree that much of Apple’s success over the past decade is directly tied to its control of the Mac and iPhone platforms. The company is still experiencing sustained success despite the recession; on July 21, Apple reported the best non-holiday quarter revenue and earnings in its history. So it’s clearly not as cut-and-dry as saying that a vendor-controlled platform can’t be successful.

In a comment on Dave’s article, ‘joestevens’ brings up an important point about the balance between building a successful system and a perfect one:

I think Apple is doing an excellent job with the App Store, it’s not perfect however, if they didn’t distribute through iTunes and handle all of the processing people would not have downloaded a billion apps. Tech savvy people would be downloading stuff , the rest would think it was too complicated and untrustworthy.

Platforms that are shared by many parties can be very powerful, but they require a significant investment of effort, time, and money that many people and organizations simply don’t have. Vendors occupy the space between a raw, open platform and a finished product that takes advantage of the platform’s capabilities and channels them into a useful application.

In this way, I’d argue that Apple’s products aren’t so much a closed platform as a carefully engineered, designed, and packaged system. The most visible element of this is Mac OS X; it takes advantage of the vast capabilities of the UNIX operating system, and packages them into something that’s elegant, easy-to-use, and powerful in its own right.

Like UNIX, the Internet is an open platform upon which many companies have engineered, designed, and packaged countless products and services:

It doesn’t employ any engineers, and when they leave one company to work for another they still work for the Internet. On the Internet no company owns all the data, so no one can control it. If you don’t like the way a service works, use another.

It isn’t so much about open vs. vendor controlled platforms, but about how vendors use those platforms to build systems, and whether the systems are well engineered, designed, packaged, and managed. Apple excels at all four elements, and the resulting system, while not perfect, is so good that many of the standard bearers in a wide range of fields choose to use it for their most important work. And when it isn’t perfect, people criticize and offer suggestions because they believe those who are capable of building something great succeed in doing so precisely because they are relentlessly looking for ways to refine and improve it.