via

Wargames, mutually assured destruction, and the coming battle to control your digital life

It’s a war for ecosystem territory, in which companies are vying to keep users within their own lands and making small but strategically important incursions on the peripheries of other players. The ecosystem war between Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook has largely become a war of attrition with limited asymmetric vulnerabilities. With a few exceptions, these entities have engaged in standard strategies like lock-in and made some limited encroachments into each others' territory. However, the relatively "cool" nature of the war should not blind one to the possibilities of more aggressive tactics.