Steve Jobs's slight of hand

http://benlog.com/articles/2010/04/29/the-genius-of-steve-jobs-he-makes-you-want-the-lock-in/

by jbellis • 16 years ago

23 9 16 years ago

benlog.com

timcederman• 16 years ago

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

qcassidy• 16 years ago

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

fab13n• 16 years ago

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)

Empact• 16 years ago

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.

GrandMasterBirt2• 16 years ago

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.

pixelbath• 16 years ago

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

benologist• 16 years ago

"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.

GrandMasterBirt2• 16 years ago

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.

etherael• 16 years ago

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.

Steve Jobs's slight of hand

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