i will keep this short, concise.
[i failed at that so here is the conclusion from all the way at the bottom:]
suffice it to say, microsoft creates an illusion of protection, apple dumbs you down so you dont know to want more. if real life experience could inform user level experience, we would have a very different attitude toward both.
i dont want to pursue this topic much further since a lot of better writers are already going after it*. i would like to hold up one attitude particular post to scrutiny however as it represents a dangerous attitude better than anything i could try to describe. i guess he already is trafficked enough to have a rep, but here is john gruber / daring fireball's explanation of the core justification of jobs comment that adobe is lazy; http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash .
this article has little to do with the iPad. it has little to do with DRM even. the attitude that is being touted and revered is that its appropriate for a company to control a hardware platform, a software platform, and a harem of consumer-grade peripherals. what is the end result of such a situation? apple, jobs, and gruber would have the world believe that it results in a better... something. depending on the situation the something changes. sometimes it is a better user experience, sometimes it is a better development experience, sometimes it is a better world. all of these things, of course, feed and bathe in the same ecosystem, so none of these are exactly diametrically opposed like tax cuts and budget deficit reduction (oh noe!).
however, jobs and his apologists are apt to justify any movement along the lines of, its my ball, you can play the game my way or go home. i dont mean to call jobs a bully, that is not the important thing here. what is are not only his apologists who evangelize to the masses, but additionally that no other CEOs "have the balls to stand up to cupertino." i throw that in alarm quotes, because that is where the diversion begins, and then its microsoft who isnt driving the market, or creative who isnt making a good enough mp3 player. however, similar to the problem i noted before, none of these other companies have the lateral monopoly that apple does.
itunes and the reported price scheduling for the iPad are not only bad insofar as they are apple-taxed. they also kill markets' elasticity. apple is an anti-competitive company. they work in the worst interest of the consumer. the price of music, and the fifteen dollar e-book on their servers is a four-alarm fire people seem to greet with open arms.
search amazon and macmillan and youll see thread after thread of people critical of amazon (sure they have supporters too), and the idea that an ebook should cost about ten dollars. for some reason people seem to unite behind macmillan and believe that an electronic book should cost twelve to fifteen dollars, or more. i dont understand this, its like people screaming and picketing that jammie russet should owe the riaa 126million. its insane.
people have been paying too much for music on the itunes store for a long time, and they likely wont stop any time soon. i personally believe that amazon is in the right. markets should seek their bottom when they are inflated. when you take the commodity out of the picture and are left purely with the intellectual property (in this case, of a book), should there really only be a 20% reduction in user cost? is that really better for customers?
as far as adobe goes, and the whole HTML5 and APIs header, suffice it to say that apple is lazy or poisoning the well to make the comments they have made. i dont support Adobe's flash. it probably is a pile of coding horror; its version ten and has probably never been torn down. however, to act like you can abandon 32-bit programs tout de suite and act like the dev is to blame bespeaks a foulness in apple.
they dont care about devs. if youre a dev, apple doesnt give a shit about you. proof of concept: if there are a billion apps, and a million devs who made them, and their combined revenue now dwarfs the entirety of the niche and cachet adobe once helped apple maintain all those years, then apple can piss on any number of big developers for the sake of their platform. what makes you special?
why is microsoft so bad? they stopped listening. they also stopped being innovative once they stopped listening. so apple et apologists thinks 264 is a solution, its not that i think ogg is ideal to scale, but it is a foundation for an open platform. h.264 is certainly not. it might be free, like beer, at the discretion of the ownership collective. however, if you return to daring fireballs article where hes talking about flash on the iphone, and the justification for non-support, youll note it takes a user's experience edge for justification. however, when you move to the flip side, its the developers who get screwed.
sure, you can watch youtube with h.264, but if you try to do anything higher up in sophistication youre going to need to license it. if you want to have a program that edits or has corporate functionality, fork over some money. or, even easier, dont make your program. just let quick time do it. let apple do it. pay them instead.
at any rate, there is a subtle coercion of users by microsoft that the user is 'secured,' and its not true. the subtle coercion of apple is that the user is 'happy,' and they may have something, but they have supported the excise of freedom. i dont think it fits, but ill throw the 'he who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither' maxim in here for some fizzle of a finish.
suffice it to say, microsoft creates an illusion of protection, apple dumbs you down so you dont know to want more. if real life expereince could inform user level experience, we would have a very different attitude toward both.
*i liked these posts and they convinced me just to finish up:
6:54AM
