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By Rob Enderle
Apple's strategy, which has worked well financially up until now, is called "vendor lock-in."
This approach, pioneered by IBM until it almost put the company out of business in the 1990s, is incredibly profitable, but it treats customers like a resource to be mined. It restricts customer movement away from the platform to provide lower quality goods at higher prices because the customer can't easily switch to something else.
In addition, with lock-in, the dominant vendor can easily replace third-party apps and products with their high-cost alternatives by crippling or just creating FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) around a third-party offering like, in this case, Tile.