What the article fails to mention is the thousands of startups and companies that tried to do things differently and failed. I think Steve Jobs took a huge risk, and he had the ability to pull it off, and he succeeded. Not everyone can do that. So many things could have gone wrong for someone else.
That is exactly how I feel as a B2B customer. Companies that sell through "the channel" have beautiful web pages showing the products and absolutely no way to find out how much something costs. You need to get a call back from a salesperson who wants to figure out who your customer is so he can "add value" right up to the limit of what you will pay. I have begged with these guys to just give me an order of magnitude: "Do you sell for $100, $1000, $10000?"
