I wrote the comment and I too grew up in the MS-DOS/Windows world. My family had a Mac and an Apple ][e, but I didn't use them as much as the various PCs.
As I say in another comment, I think Gates's view was right for that time. The Jobs view was needlessly limiting the potential market for his machines. Gates didn't make the machine, but he was making a thing that was sold with every machine, and he understood that more apps means more reasons why people might want to buy a PC.
One problem with the Gates view today is that if you make it easy for anyone to write and distribute any kind of app, you end up with not only a lot of low-quality software but even negative-quality software like ransomware and malware. It's surprising that so many people want to write that stuff, but apparently they do. Every modern platform, including Windows, has gone to extreme lengths to block this stuff, even though the more laissez-faire approach would be to just ignore it and assume other 3rd parties will write programs to block it. The problem was that malware was an existential threat to the entire Windows platform, and Microsoft couldn't afford to just let the market sort that one out.
I believe the Jobs view is the correct one for the present era. Every platform has app stores, code signing, DRM, and other kinds of security and non-security restrictions. It's certainly easier to run random code on Windows 10 than macOS Ventura (or especially iOS), but no platform vendor is completely app neutral these days.
I agree with you 100%. I think maybe the problem is that the platform vendors think it's too difficult to explain fine-grained access controls to end users, whereas an app store is dead simple to explain. And, as you observe, an app store makes money whereas ACLs do not.
Indeed I think Jobs approach to software dev was too far ahead of time, Gates pragmatic approach proved to have more leverage for computer/platform sales and growth.
In the present era, running random code is trivial - JavaScript, via a web browser. It runs in a sandbox, which limits what it can do, but it's a really big sandbox and you can do really useful things within it.
As I say in another comment, I think Gates's view was right for that time. The Jobs view was needlessly limiting the potential market for his machines. Gates didn't make the machine, but he was making a thing that was sold with every machine, and he understood that more apps means more reasons why people might want to buy a PC.
One problem with the Gates view today is that if you make it easy for anyone to write and distribute any kind of app, you end up with not only a lot of low-quality software but even negative-quality software like ransomware and malware. It's surprising that so many people want to write that stuff, but apparently they do. Every modern platform, including Windows, has gone to extreme lengths to block this stuff, even though the more laissez-faire approach would be to just ignore it and assume other 3rd parties will write programs to block it. The problem was that malware was an existential threat to the entire Windows platform, and Microsoft couldn't afford to just let the market sort that one out.
I believe the Jobs view is the correct one for the present era. Every platform has app stores, code signing, DRM, and other kinds of security and non-security restrictions. It's certainly easier to run random code on Windows 10 than macOS Ventura (or especially iOS), but no platform vendor is completely app neutral these days.