Peter Brantley (over at O’Reilly Radar) points in the direction of Joe Esposito, who wrote a piece on The Processed Book in 2003 (in First Monday) and updated it in 2005, and more recently says this that’s right on the ummmm money:
Business is not about making people happy. Business is about making capital happy. This is why Apple has a proprietary format for the iPod and why Amazon is attempting to lock users into its broad ecosystem. The Kindle is not a device. It is a component of a system.