It's one of the better articles that Tim has put out as of late.
I still don't get the angst against Apple and their approach though. If you don't care for it, don't use it - what's the big deal?
Apple has went out of its way to complete a infrastructure and effectively trained it's customers to make purchases in small amounts. From music and etc content, to anything in the App store. That's their ecosystem.
In what other market can you go inside and and just start putting products on their shelf and that be ok? I mean, I'd _love_ to walk into Wal-Mart and put a whole stock of pull-my-finger novelty gifts in aisle 9.
Sarcasm aside, I can't see how developers can bitch about an ecosystem that they're wanting to exploit. Otherwise they'd be building little j2me applications for the RAZR, or apart of the Blackberry ecosystem, or... .
But every other day there's someone new on a blog griping about something they well and truly signed up for. Android is about to be out en mass with the upcoming phones, Blackberry already has a mass of phones.
Teach those users to make purchases in an ecosystem that isn't going to be easy to do so and then leverage it. But to soapbox against Apple just doesn't make sense to me.
He makes a bad analogy because 1) you never needed Microsoft's permission to develop a Windows app and 2) developers on Windows (very nearly) had the "write once, run anywhere" promise that Java still hasn't lived up to taken for granted. Plus there were very low barriers to entry for developers in the Windows world; anyone could knock something up in VB or Access and nearly anyone else could get it to work on their Windows PC with minimal effort. Try doing that on the 50 (100?) Linux distros out there...
There is a very simple solution to getting your stuff to run on many linux distros without too much trouble: static linking.
That's not simple at all. If I want to integrate properly with your desktop, do I write my code against gnome or KDE?
If I statically link against an older (or newer) version of gnome or KDE, will it even interoperate correctly with whatever the user has running on their desktop?
If there's a security vulnerability in what should be a base system library, does every single vendor have to track those issues and release updates to their applications?
No. The right way to support binary compatibility is to define a compatible, stable API and ABI and then support that ABI/API across OS releases and updates.
> The right way to support binary compatibility is to define a compatible, stable API and ABI and then support that ABI/API across OS releases and updates.
With that I fully agree. But I think if the last decade is any indication that in the linux world we are still at least a decade away from achieving that, even though there are plenty of efforts in that direction.
Yeah, esp. since that guy had his fat binary patch rejected.
The wider point is tho', that criticizing a walled garden because it doesn't do something you want, and criticizing it on principle may overlap, but they aren't the same issue at all.
I personally quite like that Facebook is walled off from the real Internet... Go browse the comments on Youtube if you want to see what that's like.
Depends on what you mean by 'walled off.' If Facebook/MySpace were both clients to a larger 'social network' network (think possibly USENET-style, or P2P-style), we wouldn't necessarily have youtube-esque comments showing up everywhere.
Social networks are mainly places for people socialize with friends. When people get onto youtube and start flaming people they are usually not directly flaming their friends (or at least not doing so from a username that their friends will recognize). Things like privacy settings, friend lists, etc are what help to regulate something like Facebook.
If there was a well-defined protocol for pulling/pushing just the information that was needed for a particular profile (say having all of my friends updates pushed to my account on whichever server it's being hosted), then it doesn't necessarily open up this decentralized social network to youtube-style garbage. For you to see the youtube-style garbage you would need to accept the troll onto your network. And even after they were exposed as a troll, you could banish them.
Apple wants to lock you into their market and does so by locking down the platform. If your a fan of free markets, this is going in the opposite direction. A user or a publisher can choose that a 30% "tax" on a transaction (Apple's cut of App Store purchase) is ok but locking you in so that as the market grows you have no choice but to pay the 30% tax is not ok; it violates basic tenants of free market principles.
Apple has a great product today, but going against a free market generally ensures they are likely to not provide the best product/store/platform in the future.
I'm a fan of free markets when they're beneficial to all involved, and in certain cases even when they're not. Even though Apple's model isn't free, I still see it as beneficial to all involved.
Apple's "tax" provides resources and a revenue stream to cover everything from documentation to hosting the free applications. It could also play a part in driving the prices of the phone itself down. It also gives it clear bragging points which it's used quite successfully.
The user benefits from the applications, and one could assume the lack of clutter/meaningless/duplicative applications within the store itself. They also benefit from the "full product" phone->store->apps->payment ecology.
The developer wins because they get to develop towards a product that has a great feature set, an ecology with paying customers and momentum in the product itself.
Windows, Blackberry, Palm et all have all had ways to work with previous products before the IPhone without issue, under the free market approach. No true central registry, no payment ecology, and hasn't gained anything from it directly. Now android is in the mix, and as far as the payments goes, it's not looking too pretty from what's being put out there so far, but it's early yet we'll see.
I'm not defending Apple, I don't even own an Iphone (BB user, contract about up, going to N900). But when someone sits as a developer and continues to blast Apple because it's not open enough (when it's never been "open enough" & when you look how "open" phones before it were...) - it honestly baffles me. If they don't want the Apple "tax", don't play. Through Itunes/Ipod Apple has done something no one else has really done on the web, got users to pay. When the other companies can do the same thing, then we'll see how they do down the road.
Essentially I keep thinking of this. The Texas State Fair rivals as one of the biggest in the United States and doesn't look to lose that anytime soon. It operates in the same persona as Apple does. It selects by committee through applicants on who can be there, you pay a tax (rules, and fees) on how to operate. However, there's a ton of paying people there, so you deal with the rules at hand, because you're getting "fed".
It may not be free in the purest of sense, but griping after going in knowing full well it isn't is idiotic IMO.
Developers don't benefit from having an all powerful middleman inserted between themselves and their users/customers. It's not that Apple just makes the rules. They don't even bother to make proper rules. They just rule.
But you're right, contrary to being born as a subject under some absolute monarch, I can make a choice in this case. My choice as a user and as a developer is not to accept the kind of nasty middleman structure Apple is perfecting.
I still don't get the angst against Apple and their approach though. If you don't care for it, don't use it - what's the big deal?
Apple has went out of its way to complete a infrastructure and effectively trained it's customers to make purchases in small amounts. From music and etc content, to anything in the App store. That's their ecosystem.
In what other market can you go inside and and just start putting products on their shelf and that be ok? I mean, I'd _love_ to walk into Wal-Mart and put a whole stock of pull-my-finger novelty gifts in aisle 9.
Sarcasm aside, I can't see how developers can bitch about an ecosystem that they're wanting to exploit. Otherwise they'd be building little j2me applications for the RAZR, or apart of the Blackberry ecosystem, or... .
But every other day there's someone new on a blog griping about something they well and truly signed up for. Android is about to be out en mass with the upcoming phones, Blackberry already has a mass of phones.
Teach those users to make purchases in an ecosystem that isn't going to be easy to do so and then leverage it. But to soapbox against Apple just doesn't make sense to me.