Dilger blasts the Wall Street Journal for calling Apple's garden 'walled'

“I have been rebutted many times in many mediums but this by @danieleran is the rebuttalist of them all.” — Christopher Mims

From Daniel Eran Dilger’s No, Apple’s licensing of iTunes & AirPlay 2 isn’t a ‘strategy reversal’ in any way posted Friday on AppleInsider:

In his piece “Apple’s Next Move: Be More Like Microsoft,” Christopher Mims portrayed Apple as making a “radical shift in its corporate strategy” by licensing the AirPlay protocol and supporting iTunes content playback on non-Apple platforms.

He also cited Apple’s move last month to support Apple Music on Amazon’s Alexa-powered Echo appliances as another example of the company “blasting holes in the boundaries of its staunchly defended walled garden,” by allowing its own media content services to work on non-Apple hardware.

“For years,” Mims dramatically wrote, “a big part of Apple’s premium experience—and justification for its premium pricing—has been that its software and services are only available on its hardware.”

That’s not even remotely true, though.

My take: There are counter-examples; the first two years of iTunes, for example. But Dilger is right. Apple’s “walled garden” is a piece of business-reporting shorthand that everybody—including yours truly—tosses in without a second thought.