The global chairman and CEO of home networking giant Netgear has launched into a scathing attack on Apple and its founder Steve Jobs, criticising Jobs's "ego" and Apple's closed up products.
At a lunch in Sydney today, Patrick Lo said Apple's success was centred on closed and proprietary products that would soon be overtaken by open platforms like Google's Android.
Apple has had unparallelled success by being able to control the entire ecosystem around its products, from the hardware to the software to the acquisition of content and apps through iTunes.
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Steve Jobs ... regarded as a tech visionary. Photo: Getty
It has used this to effectively dominate the market and shut out competitors. Consumers have also benefited because they get a consistent experience and products that are easier to use.
Lo said Apple's closed model only worked because, in many product categories like MP3 players, "they own the market".
However, he said this was only a temporary state of affairs and pointed to the fact that Google's open-source Android platform for smartphones - which any manufacturer can use for free - recently overtook iPhone in market share in the US.
"Once Steve Jobs goes away, which is probably not far away, then Apple will have to make a strategic decision on whether to open up the platform," said Lo.
"Ultimately a closed system just can't go that far ... If they continue to close it and let Android continue to creep up then it's pretty difficult as I see it."
Lo said the industry had "seen this movie play several times", pointing to the Betamax vs. VHS video format war, Mac vs. Windows and various proprietary networking protocols that at one stage tried to compete with the now dominant TCP/IP.
In each of the above cases, the more open platforms won more market share. However, Apple has bucked this trend so far with its closed ecosystems for the iPhone and iPad.
"Right now the closed platform has been successful for Apple because they've been so far ahead as thought leaders because of Steve Jobs," said Lo.
"Eventually they've got to find a way to open up iTunes without giving too much away on their revenue generation model."
He said he believed Android would overtake iPhone globally and he predicted the platform could become the de facto standard for a range of consumer electronic devices, such as TVs and home media servers.
Lo said content providers such as the movie studios were very "wary" of Jobs as the closed model of iTunes meant they were forced to pay a "ransom" to Jobs for selling their content on the service.
"Steve Jobs wants to suffocate the distribution so even though he doesn't own the content he could basically demand a ransom," he said.
Lo also criticised Jobs's public thrashing of the Adobe Flash format, attributing it to his "ego".
"What's the reason for him to trash Flash? There's no reason other than ego," he said.
Asked if he had relayed any of his concerns about Apple's closed platform to Jobs, Lo said: "Steve Jobs doesn't give me a minute!"
But Lo also reserved some barbs for Microsoft, saying he believed the company had fallen behind and that Windows Phone 7 would languish behind Android and iPhone.
"Microsoft is over - game over - from my point of view," he said.
Never afraid to speak his mind, Lo also said Netgear had seen a boom in sales of its Wi-Fi network booster product due to the trend of people taking their iPads with them into the bathroom. The extenders are used to boost the wireless signal so it can reach other rooms.
But he said that this year the big trend for Netgear was IPTV and connecting people's home entertainment devices, such as their TVs and Blu-ray players, to the internet.
Asked whether he was concerned about reports that the world would run out of internet address within weeks, Lo compared the issue to the shift from 2G networks to 3G networks and beyond.
"It's disruptive, but we love it - everybody has to buy something new," he said.
Lo praised the National Broadband Network, saying it would unleash a torrent of online creativity and be a economic boon for Australia. He said it was difficult for the private sector to fund such a network here due to Australia's "huge geography".
The NBN, he said, would lead to a "gold rush of cloud computing services", in a similar way that the mainstream acceptance of the internet 10 years ago led to an explosion in ISPs.
"It will generate so much creativity for people to make new businesses on the internet," said Lo.
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