

Steve Jobs's slight of hand - jbellis
http://benlog.com/articles/2010/04/29/the-genius-of-steve-jobs-he-makes-you-want-the-lock-in/

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timcederman
Sorry, the pedant in me can't help myself. Sleight.

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Empact
The author seems to neglect the legitimate practical problems of Adobe gaining
market power on the iPhone platform.

If Adobe creates a translation layer from flash to cocoa, and developers use
it en masse, then an issue within the translation layer becomes far more
problematic: instead of rejecting the developer who wrote the bad code, they
have to reject a whole host of apps from innocent developers who used an off-
the-shelf third-party framework. As the number of these apps increases, the
pressure grows on Apple to work around the problem rather than simply force
Adobe to behavior properly. Over time these workarounds corrupt the system
they're building and set them down the path of Microsoft.

Not that this is an insurmountable concern, but there are practical matters
beyond app quality or lock-in.

~~~
GrandMasterBirt
I must disagree. Microsoft did not fail in the same way RIM did not fail
because of 3rd party developers. I will use RIM as an example. RIM just now is
coming out with a platform to bring blackberry out of the stone-age. Was it
the app developers' fault for not writing wonderful BB apps? Or is the
platform so shitty nobody wants a BB unless their job gives it to them? We got
WebOS, Symbian, Android, Windows 7 they are all coming out as a competitor to
iPhone OS and BlackBerry 2.0. RIM is now finally listening to what their
clients want because their business is being stolen from right under their
feet, and they just realized that. Had they had the attitude of "lets fix the
problems our users are complaining about" 3 years ago, the state of everything
would be different. Now
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/29/rim_blackberry_os_6> at the quote in
there. Apple is playing catchup slowly to RIM, but that does not matter. Apple
has the momentum and is building it, once they implement enough to make
enterprises be able to use iphone instead of BB boom rim loses everything,
because go up to someone and ask "free blackberry curve, or free iphone (plans
included)?" guess the answer.

The point is the same with MS. Until Apple started kicking them in the shin,
Windows XP (a piece of shit) was the pinnacle of technology. We see XP NOW as
shit, but back in the day I was thinking "wow crashing XP is 100x as hard as
BSODing in windows 98, windows xp is awesome!" Remember Windows ME (the
unwanted child)?

So Adobe building the "lowest common dinominator" technology for cross
platform is BS as well. "features x,y,z are for iphone only until android
implements it" which means: a) android better start implementing, b)
developers have MOST of their work cut out for them when porting. Maybe take a
few different directions when porting to android. It's not like I ever expect
to write an iphone app and with no work/testing just port it to android and
vuala. And maybe for a developer it means no android app until the feature is
implemented. And thus back to (a) which is android now has an incentive for
implementing features.

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benologist
"open, copy-and-paste-the-source-code Web that we know and love"

....

Being able to view what is almost always the most trivial layer of a website
is not the same as open. Most websites, even those on open platforms, are very
much closed.

~~~
GrandMasterBirt
Hold up let me pull up gmail source code so I can learn from it... Oh crap its
minified, and packed. My l33t open web h4x0r attempts have been foiled again.

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fab13n
I always thought that the dictatorial(1) attitude towards what can go on an
iPhone was temporary: long enough for a healthy development ecosystem to
establish itself, basically.

Once competitors become credible, and openness becomes a relevant argument for
average customers, there's no harm in _also_ allowing cross-platform software
that sucks: good software will hopefully already be there, and customers will
have been educated to expect a certain level of quality on Apple platforms.

(1) in the antique Roman sense (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dictator>)

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qcassidy
There's a slight misspelling in this headline (and in the article itself).

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pixelbath
He's insulting hands now? Or are his hands just really small?

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etherael
Remeber Microsoft trying to kill Netscape? We want everything to be open
standard, any standards our competitor makes we will embrace and extend.

We all know how that turned out, just because companies dress up their actions
in warm and fuzzy PR speak doesn't mean they're not playing for keeps.

