That sentence is one instance of this sentence:
Developers have used <platformFunction> in ways <inventor> could never have imagined.
What better argument for open standards, APIs, and community cooperation?
I'm all for open standards, API's and community cooperation of course. I just don't think that Apple is necessarily the antithesis.
The fundamental difference between Apple's position today to Microsoft's monoculture of the previous decade lies in their motivations.
Apple wants to make great stuff.
Microsoft wanted to control the world.
btw PG: I rfs8.html is not on the rfs.html page yet.
If there were any way to quantify this -- "quality-of-life improvement credits" -- Apple would likely be quite rich in these as well as simply in financial currencies.
Its hard to imagine now but there will be Apple without their fearless leader one day. They are a profit seeking venture like any other--brilliant marketing has people convinced otherwise.
My question is: what has Apple done to directly propel the world (particularly the 3+ billion people in the "third world" - impoverished and middle class) towards globalization? Microsoft (perhaps in their bid for control) has donated & sold (or subsidized) millions of products to this group of people. In some countries, apple hasn't even attempted to sell their products at reasonable prices despite the opportunity. Isn't ushering all parts of the world into the next decade as important as creating the next great iOS?
If the workers were not happy with their workplace and conditions, they are free to leave, or even better, organize a labor union.
Also, be advised the GE could also pay their chinese laborers a bit more, if you would be willing to pay more for your microwave, you water heater, your light bulbs, your cookware, etc. It's not going to happen. Let China enjoy being the manufacturing capital of the world while we still have fossil fuels, k?
Apple on the other hand clearly does care what you put on your iOS device, and in ways that go beyond a desire for good UX to a desire to control what is acceptable for society: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/apple-finds-christianity-offe...
You don't have to use any Apple device if you don't want to. That choice is yours.
I spent many years working in places where you had to use Microsoft products. There was no choice.
Microsoft didn't care what you put on your machine because all they care about is making money selling you stuff.
Then that's when I'll start to take issue with them.
And Voltaire, "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."
That's ridiculous - you had choice - you could have chosen to work elsewhere. Can't get the same pay, conditions, etc? That's not the point.
These days there are plenty of jobs where you'll have to use a Mac because Jobs has dictated that you can only do iOS development on a (recent) Mac.
If their number one priority was really to please the end-user, they'd be selling everything at cost, open-sourcing and giving away OS X for free, etc. People are generally greatly pleased when they can get cool stuff for cheap or free.
Apple wants to please their customers so much that Apple is deciding what apps their customers are allowed to use, because their customers are too stupid to correctly choose the application that works best for his/her needs. And if you attempt to circumvent this restriction, Apple will do everything in its power, technically and legally, to stop you from doing so.
Did Microsoft ever endeavor to do this? Personally, I find top-down control of the entire distribution channel more of a "platform lock-in" thing than encouraging the use of proprietary IE extensions.
It seems to me that Apple develops more to please Apple than to please end-users. The worship that Apple gets is so very silly, in my opinion.
EDIT: here, straight from the horse's mouth http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
Your comment, while mostly fiction IMO, does have a nice storyline.
I've known plenty of people whose jobs didn't even require the use of a computer; if you are so picky about the software you use, perhaps you could consider a line of work that doesn't involve much computer usage.
MS did try to push people into software as a service (but they failed at it). They support DVD region encoding. They have introduced DRM music services. They struck agreements to hamper attempts to sell dual-boot systems. I didn't experience this but understand that at one point windows media player would happily scan existing content on the drive and helpfully encomber it with DRM. Sharepoint takes data in from all sorts of sources but it's much harder to get it out again.
MS have also EOL'd products that dominate major market segments despite users who would have paid plenty for stability: original VB, excel before UI change, every NT release.
These are the actions of a company trying to increase its control on users, attempting to control what they do on their computer.
By way of comparison, traditional unix vendors would be more helpful of big-pocketed companies who wanted to pay to continue to use old software. They could have reversed a firewall and other patches into NT4 that would have hardened it and kept it going if they'd wanted to - these are the teams that reverse-engineered photoshop and hundreds of games and then hotpatched new code over their memory segments when they loaded so that they could get DOS and W3.1 software to run fine on Windows 95 for the release. Interesting alternate history. What if MS had tried to keep NT4sp3 tight and stable and kept drivers coming, and brought it forward conservatively.
Oh, how a decade of stagnation can change perceptions...
Compare a Mac with windows, instead.
I wish people would stop saying that Bill Gates has always been a nice guy because he's retired and giving away his money.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that MS is more open, they don't have much of a mobile OS for you to compare with iOS anyways.
And Apple is going to kill off so many hardware companies because if it wins like Windows, it's going to be the sole arbitrator of who gets to build hardware for it.
All MS wanted was for you to pay the Windows tax. Apple wants to control the hardware as well. Eg. Windows Phone 7 is a OS that various OEMs can run on different devices. iOS is basically just firmware for Apple's devices.
It may be hard to appreciate today, but in the 90's you couldn't start a software company without a ready answer for how you were going to survive if MS decided they had to kill your product to protect the Windows monopoly.
I don't think anyone claimed that Apple's e.g. censoring porn is the same kind as Microsoft murdering competition and slowing down development.
For porn -- relax, much online video works on the iPad. :-)
I would argue almost all areas is better with competition. If you prefer monopoly solutions, there is still North Korea (Cuba will go a bit capitalism, I've seen).
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_i...
Aside from that, Apple can certainly be prudish, but that's more out of a desire to remain unobjectionable rather than a desire to control what is acceptable for society. They don't care if you play controversial games, they just don't want to be associated with such games.
Just look at webkit and how Apple's competitors build (are in the process of building) their entire foundations on top of that tech and Apple still contributes.
The OP's argument doesn't necessarily follow because usefulness does not equate to functionality and hack-ability. Good design is not something you can quantify by "featurefulness". If it were, users would have stopped buying new copies of Microsoft Office years ago. Following from the end line of Paul Graham's post, if you give hackers an inch, they will take you a mile. PG doesn't state whether or not that is a mile in the direction your preferred direction of travel.
Also: Developers have used the accelerometer in ways Apple would never approve of. These apps we don't get to see. At least not yet.
After having two jailbroken iPhones, I have to say, I didn't really see any killer accelerometer apps in Rock or Cydia.
If they used the accelerometer to measure how hard they hit people over the head with iPad when mugging them, and triggered a string of copycat attacks, that wouldn't be desirable for Apple or society.
It's almost arguing against firewalls - why restrict computer access when developers can find so many new and interesting uses for it? (Buffer overflows, spam and more is why. Default-deny is the good practise alternative. Assuming that's my stance, your suggestion isn't a convincing argument at all).
And your firewall example is not relevant. Hackers aren't using firewalls against the companies that employ them, they are circumventing the firewalls. What you said is more like "people can climb over fences easily, so we should stop building them around our yards"
My example is relevant because it directly counters edw519's implicit claim that "if an idea can be used in surprising ways, that is good" by citing open network connections as an example of something used in surprising ways which are bad, and our opposition to that by using a "not open" stance as the agreed best position.
To be convincing that openness is good, it would need to be established that significant good comes from it, or that more good than bad comes from it, or that at least serious bad cannot come from it or similar.
Saying that X can be used in previously unexpected ways is neither here nor there as an argument for open APIs or collaboration, whether or not I like open APIs and collaboration.
Actually, on rereading your original comment, I think I misunderstood that paragraph. The exact wording is still very confusing to me, but what I think you were trying to say is that edw519's implicit argument (for all X, X should be open because it can be used in surprising ways) can be applied to network connections, where network connections are the X. I thought you meant that firewalls were the X, and that idea is what I was arguing against.
In fact, one entire category of technology that's overlooked right now is sensors. Besides sound (mic) and light (camera), accelerometers and magnetometers are already there. Some other detectors of "state" that make sense:
Pressure (think of being able to predict rain) Humidity/Temperature (think of an environment controller) Directional Microphone (4): Conferencing, noise cancellation, etc.