> Microsoft aimed higher and sought to pretty much own the entire ecosystem and everything in it.
They've wanted to own the ecosystem but not everything in it. In fact, there was a significant strategic tension between wanting to control the tools developers use to build apps and wanting to leave the app development space as open and accessible as possible.
You don't need a developer licence to write an app to run on Windows. Likewise, you don't need permission from Microsoft to sell that app to Windows users. You don't even need to be running Windows on your development machine. Those are three significant, meaningful ways that Microsoft's approach, even at its most hegemonic, has always been more open, accessible and inclusive than Apple's.
You do not need anything from Apple to write or sell apps for the Mac, either, and I do not think you ever needed that (early Macintosh, say before the phonebook edition of Inside Macintosh, may have been an exception, as the information you needed simply was not out there. You also would have needed a Mac to write the floppy disks that most software got distributed on (there was some distribution over the Internet using Kermit))
It is true that it is way easier to write programs using Apple's (free, at the moment) tools, and it sure helps to have access to a Mac, if alone for testing, but you do not _need_ either. In that, it is not that much different from Windows. You can write Windows (Win32 or .NET) tools on Unix, but I would not advise going that way.
> You do not need anything from Apple to write or sell apps for the Mac,
For now that remains true on OSX, but it's not true for iOS, which is what TFA is about, and as OSX imports more ideas from iOS I'm not entirely comfortable it will remain true.
They've wanted to own the ecosystem but not everything in it. In fact, there was a significant strategic tension between wanting to control the tools developers use to build apps and wanting to leave the app development space as open and accessible as possible.
You don't need a developer licence to write an app to run on Windows. Likewise, you don't need permission from Microsoft to sell that app to Windows users. You don't even need to be running Windows on your development machine. Those are three significant, meaningful ways that Microsoft's approach, even at its most hegemonic, has always been more open, accessible and inclusive than Apple's.