How the Internet Became Commercial: Innovation, Privatization, and the Birth of a New Network (The Kauffman Foundation Series on Innovation and Entrepreneurship)

by Shane Greenstein

Well-managed proprietary platforms, such as Microsoft’s Windows, also could efficiently manage contributions from many specialized application developers. Open platforms, such as TCP/IP, allowed technical change to come from many contributors by making information accessible and from not restricting what got built for the platform, while proprietary platforms resisted changes that reduced the value captured by a platform leader.