There was once a time when the business of consumer technology was conducted with tangible goods. You bought a thing, whether it was a Sony VCR or a Sega console, you carried it home amidst a hormonal high of hunter-gatherer instinct, and you prayed to the electro-deities that it wouldn't lose whatever format war it was engaged in. Adding functionality to your purchase was done in the same way. You returned to the store, picked up cartridges, cassettes, or discs, and inserted them into the appropriate receptacle.

That overriding paradigm hasn't actually changed in modern times, even as the devices themselves have grown exponentially more versatile. Your choice of hardware still matters in determining what you can and can't access, though the competition among companies is increasingly moving to the software and services realm. The physical format wars of yesteryear have naturally morphed into contests between various online services, whose growing multitude has been handily summarized by the term "ecosystem." And the thing about ecosystems is that every big shot in the technology world has one.