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Comment by siculars | Hacker News Reader

Apple is clearly in the wrong here. I hate to say it but they seem to be turning into the new "Empire".

It is as if AT&T said you could only use a certain phone to make phone calls. Or ConEd said you could only use certain appliances with their electricity. Or Intel said you could only use their compiler to write programs that run on their processors. The list is endless.

This is an exercise in futility. Apple really needs to give this a rest and relax. Let the market place determine which application experiences are better than others.

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As a result, by 1940 the Bell System effectively owned most telephone service in the United States, from local and long-distance service to the telephones themselves. This allowed Bell to prohibit their customers from connecting phones not made or sold by Bell to the system without paying fees. For example, if a customer desired a type of phone not leased by the local Bell monopoly, he or she had to purchase the phone at cost, give it to the phone company, then pay a 're-wiring' charge and a monthly lease fee in order to use it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System#Government_sanction...

Thank you Carterphone

In 1968, the Federal Communications Commission allowed the Carterfone and other devices to be connected directly to the AT&T network, as long as they did not cause harm to the system. This ruling (13 F.C.C.2d 420) created the possibility of selling devices that could connect to the phone system using a protective coupler, and opened the market to customer-owned equipment. The decision is often referred-to as "any lawful device"...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone

Here's to hoping this same ruling happens in the wireless space next.

When I worked for Apple, we once had a discussion about how things might have been different if Apple and Microsoft's market positions were reversed. I said that's kind of like those historical fiction stories asking what would have happened had the Nazis won World War II.

I think now with the iPhone, we're getting to see what it might have been like if Apple had dominated the PC market.

Stuff like this is probably why they didn't. You only have to piss off a couple of the right developers and the next big thing ends up with your competition.

My impression was that Apple lost the PC war mainly on price. Who were the "right developers" that they pissed off?

All of them. When the Mac first came out, long long ago, Dearly Beloved, they had a development package you had to buy if you wanted to develop for the Mac. The IBM PC, as inferior as its UI was, had free tools, and soon had actual compilers (!).

As a result, the Mac's toolset essentially consisted of whatever Apple had written, for a couple of years, while development for the PC exploded instantaneously and you could do anything at all with it -- even if it looked like crap, you could actually do what you wanted, and soon enough, Windows came out and it looked less like crap.

Jobs has just barely learned the lesson of 1983. There are lots of apps available for the iPhone and iPad. What he hasn't learned is the larger lesson, which is that owning an entire market might be lucrative in the short term, but in the longer term it won't work.

What I wonder is how much abuse can Adobe take from Apple. First they developed a version of Flash for the iPhone. I'm sure that cost them a pretty penny. Next they developed the CS5 iPhone packager thing and I'm sure that cost even more. Each time they do this and Apple rejects their product, they simply lose money. Google did the same thing with Latitude and Google Voice. Anybody else developed something for the iPhone that got completely rejected?

It might be interesting if Adobe were to discontinue selling their CS software on the Mac platform. Sure, it would hurt them short-term, but long-term Apple would lose the mindshare that Macs are for artists, as Photoshop is the primary program that maintains that reputation.

The thing is Adobe is a corporate with standard management that would never be able to "think" of something like this.

They have no "soul" (corporate culture) nor anybody with sufficient power and vision to at least try something like this.

What would be smart of them would be to increase the prices on Mac products as to make them much less desirable compared to the PC variant. This would slowly drive users towards PCs. I know a lot of designers that bought Macs precisely to run Adobe software. So if they make it even more expensive perhaps designers will start using Windows variants some more.

Then again, once you get used to the Apple way of pricing things, Adobe's move might seem natural and business will go on as usual.

"but long-term Apple would lose the mindshare that Macs are for artists"

That already happened in CG/3D space, mainly thanks to Autodesk. Mac is starting to lose ground on editing as well due to AVID getting better for smaller shops. I can see it happen in graphics design area soon also.

This is an exercise in futility. Apple really needs to give this a rest and relax. Let the market place determine which application experiences are better than others.

Yes that has worked so well for mobile phones so far...

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