A lesson from history for Facebook

Back in the mid 80's Apple launched their now popular Apple Mac with the Mac OS. The Mac OS was the first GUI based OS on a personal computer. All Microsoft had was the rickety MSDOS. Microsoft was caught napping. It took Microsoft 10 years (windows 95) to come out with something equivalent to the Mac OS! Their earlier attempts, windows 3.0 and 3.1 being failures.

Working in favor of Microsoft was the fact that MSDOS was open, and could be used by any hardware vendor, while the Mac OS used the proprietary Apple hardware. 

Apple had a choice to make. Open up Mac OS to all hardware vendors or stay proprietary. They chose to stay proprietary, keeping the price of a Mac higher than a equivalent PC. Apple could have really trashed Microsoft if they had opened up Mac OS to the hardware vendors back then.

By the late 80's Apple was inching closer to bankruptcy, while William Gates was laughing all the way to the bank!

Facebook is pretty much faced with the same situation as Apple back then, as far as their Facebook Connect is concerned. They can choose to Open it up by supporting OpenID or stay proprietary. Only this time they have a bunch of contenders to deal with instead of just Microsoft. 

Of cource the circumstances for Facebook are different today. But the underlying strategic mistake made by Apple cannot be missed. I hope Facebook learns from the past, and chooses to support OpenID as an OP, before it is too late.