How Steve Jobs Made the iPad Succeed When All Other Tablets Failed

From Wired:

Steve Jobs's solution to Google's Android-everywhere strategy was simple and audacious: he unveiled the iPad. Many knew Jobs was going to unveil a tablet despite what he had told Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal seven years before. "It turns out people want keyboards . . . We look at the tablet and we think it is going to fail," Jobs had said.

But he'd clearly reconsidered this. If Google was going to try to win the mobile-platform war on breadth, Jobs was going to win it on depth. All then-Android chief Andy Rubin had to do to expand Android was to get it on more and more machines; like Bill Gates with Windows, Rubin didn't care which products were hits and which were not as long as in the aggregate the Android platform was growing. For Jobs to make Apple's strategy work - to grow the iOS platform vertically - he needed to hit it out of the park every time.

When executives inside and outside Apple wondered if Jobs was making the same mistake against Android that he made against Microsoft - if he was keeping his platform too rigid - it seemed that, if anything, Jobs was increasing its rigidity. Starting in 2010, Jobs had more and more Apple products assembled with special screws to make it difficult for anyone with typical screwdriver heads to open the cases of his machines. (It seemed like a small thing, but to those inside Silicon Valley its symbolism was large: One of Android's pitches to consumers was the flexibility of the software and the devices.)

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