Apple and proprietary design
Add Sony and IBM to that list - and all 3 did relatively poorly through the 90s as far as PC designs are concerned. Instead, Dell and HP excelled during this era - and they did so on fairly generic PC designs that were inexpensive to manufacture, support, repair and purchase. And I'm sure there are people who are going to argue this point with me - but the fact is that Apple, Sony and IBM largely failed in the desktop PC market (In fact, if it were just Apple desktop and laptop PCs driving Apple, they wouldn't be that remarkable of a company right now). All 3 of these brands carved out niches *mostly* among high-end laptop markets - but beyond that their PC sales were relatively unimpressive.
I'm just not *positive* that the old paradigm applies - or applies the *same* to mobile devices like tablets and a phones. Phones in particular, have all adopted a billion different proprietary interfaces from the very start, all had locked down OS platforms that *could* be hacked, but were difficult to do so (I've used BitPim to hack Verizon dumb-phones into smart-phone like performance), and they have been considered throw-away-every-two-year devices. As smart-phones drive that price up to a couple-of-hundred bucks every couple of years for a subsidized phone, we'll see if people get more picky, I think there is already indication that this is taking place (Motorola can't support a half dozen different Webdock keyboards - so they're going to have to develop a single unified i/o port and maintain it from generation to generation... which is a SMART move).
