Its been about ten years since I last saw Pirates of Silicon Valley (back when I was still in college). I know a lot of the truth in the movie has been stretched a bit, but I still love the movie. I watched it again today and its amazing to me how the same basic ideas and arguments around innovation still hold true. Both Apple (which is now a very different company in Steve Jobs' second tenure) and Microsoft were trying to build platforms for consumers/enterprises. Apple did it by building the largest closed platform or walled garden. They wanted their software to be exclusive to their hardware (which they still do now, but in a much more open lenient way by allowing others to create software and apps for their hardware). Microsoft tried to create the biggest open platform for software that would work on any hardware. The movie depicts Gates stealing Jobs' UI (which Jobs stole from Xerox) and using it on an NEC, IBM, etc.
If you look at the tech world now, a similar war is going on between Google and Facebook. Google is the open web that serves ads (and drives CPMs) based on everything on the web. On the other hand, Facebook is the closed platform or walled garden (which Google does not have access to), using the information that is created by its users to serve its ads (I have no doubt Facebook will create a larger ad network for all websites using Facebook connect). The question is which is more valuable to advertisers? The closed information that Facebook has or the open (which can include transactions) information that Google optimizes.
Here is a fun clip from Pirates of Silicon Valley:
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