Business Insider has a great interview with Apple’s first CEO, which offers this gem:

[W]hen IBM decided to get into the PC market they chop-shopped out the hardware to several different groups so you had a mess of hardware, and they’ve been trying to cobble the software on it ever since.

And you still see that in the phones and the iPad or the computers. You have to control both, or you end up with a mess. Android is a good example now, as Google’s learning, if you don’t have a level of discipline, you end up ruining the product.

For all the people complaining about Google increasingly locking things down, that will probably benefit the platform in the long run, because it will be able to control more of the experience. Whether Google has the design and UX know-how to really compete with Apple in this area (and its online apps suggest it doesn’t) remains to be seen. I’ll bet Amazon does though.