Nintendo seems to believe that Apple (News - Alert) is the gaming giant’s most-significant long-term rival, adding the game console business to other business segments already engaged in ferocious or developing competition with Apple.

Those segments now include the mobile advertising industry, smartphone industry, PC industry, browser, operating system businesses, and in an indirect sense, the music, video and print content industries.

Satoru Iwata, Nintendo president, appears to have told his senior executives recently to regard the battle with Sony as a victory already won and to treat Apple, and its iPhone (News - Alert) and iPad devices, as the “enemy of the future.”

And though most companies in almost any field will find that “open” or “standards-based” sourcing models benefit them, that is not always the case for the leaders in a market. Simply put, smaller firms will prefer open models because it lowers their costs of doing business. Dominant firms can use “closed” models to build a business “moat,” and Apple might cause any number of larger firms to rethink their own strategies.

Think of Apple as a company that controls its own supply chain, from chips to retail distribution, quite tightly. It works for Apple. The issue is whether it can be made to work for other large contestants in similar ways, despite their preference for “open” or “standards-based” supply chains in general.

Consider the argument that Apple, always the exception to the “open is better” rule, has disrupted the “open and standards-based “Wintel” model, at long last. The issue is differentiation, in large part, and whether differentiation now is more easily accomplished with a more “proprietary” approach.

That might be why Hewlett-Packard was happy to buy Palm: in gaining WebOS, it can create differentiated experiences not possible using the open and standards-based Windows OS and Intel (News - Alert) processors.

To be sure, a huge ecosystem has been built on standards. But Apple arguably has changed the game. Where it once was a small PC manufacturer, Apple now seems to be emerging as a leading platform in its own right, vertically integrating nearly everything it does, from software to hardware to distribution, based on “proprietary” approaches.

That might be the new wrinkle: computer-based consumer electronics might not be a matter of creating products using commodity chips and software. The over-used admonition to become “experience providers” is relevant here. Apple’s recent success seems to argue for more uniqueness, and might be harder to pull off using standards or “open” platforms in the new environment, where “experience” matters more than it used to.

Think of Starbucks, where the draw is not “coffee,” but “experience.” And though Apple was heavily criticized for opening its own retail stores at the time, the retail stores seem to have helped Apple craft an experience distinct from those of many competitors relying on standards-based platforms.

By insisting on a proprietary and highly-integrated approach, from chips to retail, Apple might be showing that something important has changed.

When Apple’s business was based on PCs, and had market share of three percent to four percent, nobody much cared.

The iPod was a turning point. Nine years after the iPod was introduced, it held 74 percent of the market for MP3 players.

Apple then did the same thing with the iPhone. In about a year and a half, Apple had grown from nothing to the third-largest mobile-phone-maker in the world, as measured by revenue.

Consumer electronics products are “supposed” to become commodities over time, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for Apple, which seems to be able to maintain its margins and share.

It’s App Store and iTunes are largely responsible In the handheld-game market, there are about 607 games available for the portable version of Sony’s PlayStation, 3,680 games available for the Nintendo DS and 21,178 games available through Apple’s Apps Store for playing on the iPod Touch, the iPhone and now the iPad, one might note.

Apple seems to have gotten such attention from developers because Apple has consumer allegiance. As a generalization, developers now write for Apple first, where they used to write for Windows first. Now developers write for Android (News - Alert) after they first have developed an app for the Apple platforms.

To put matters simply, Apple just seems to have gained a first-mover advantage based on a subjective “coolness” factor that others have not been able to replicate.

Google habitually is listed as a firm that could challenge Apple, if it can overcome the intangible nature of most of its products and embed hardware and retail distribution to create a compelling “experience.”

The issue is whether something rather fundamental has changed in the consumer electronics business, and whether Apple now is the best-positioned company to execute on that change.