Steve Jobs Called Him To Explain. "Apple Is The Steam Train That Owns The Tracks."

Business Onion · 2:57

In 2002 a small company called Karelia made a Mac app called Watson. Apple shipped its own version of it, built into the operating system, for free — and Steve Jobs phoned Karelia's founder Dan Wood to explain why. By Wood's account, Jobs told him Karelia was a handcar, and Apple was the steam train that owns the tracks. It's the clearest description of platform power anyone has given, and it came from the platform itself. This is the final part of THE PLATFORM EATS ITS CHILDREN — a series about one move: a company owns the thing everyone else has to build on, watches which products succeed there, lets somebody else prove the market is real, then ships its own version into it. Microsoft owned the machine. Google owned the page. The AI companies own the model. Apple has held that power longer than any of them, and what's strange is how rarely it uses it. Which apps Apple takes and which it leaves alone turns out to be almost perfectly predictable — and once you know the rule, it explains what happened to Watson in 2002.