In my local discount store there is a whole isle devoted to iPod compatible docking devices, by companies like Bose, Sony, etc.

But as far as I know there is no iPod docking station compatible player not made by Apple. Why not?

Instead of building an open standard, Apple has built a proprietary standard that has allowed a self serving ecology to be built up around its products. This is not a stupid thing to do, Microsoft has been doing it for years Facebook is poised to do the same, Amazon, Twitter, Myspace, and Google too, although I think Google is far less guilty of this than most.

Could a successful iPod/iPhone ecology not have been built on fully open standards? Or if so, would Apple not have profited from it? Questions we may be asking ourselves in a few years when cell phones and music players (cameras, TVs and a lot of other electronic devices) take their place as specialty computers and users forget to be interested in what version of the operating system (or which operating system) they are running or whether they have the very latest model.

What will be the new focus of Apple at that time? I hope they are thinking about that.