I'm with you, but stand by my claim that if Adam Lisagor had shot an ad for Color, Gruber's tone would be entirely different.
Here's another post about a photo-taking application earlier this week:
Here's another post about a photo-taking application earlier this week:
Personally, I disagree with Gruber: Facebook and Foursquare seem to be evidence that people will gladly give up their personal data in exchange for a "social" experience. But whether Gruber is right or wrong is not the point I was responding to, it's whether Gruber would hypothetically like the app if it was hypothetically bought by Apple.
This is irrelevant to what he's saying now. Even if he does like everything Apple does and does hate everything Apple doesn't do, appealing to his bias is the textbook definition of an Ad Hominem:
An ad hominem, short for argumentum ad hominem,
is an attempt to link the validity of a premise
to a characteristic or belief of the opponent
advocating the premise.
In that case, dismissing him because of his bias might rob us of a valuable insight.
In fact, the way I read flyt's comment is that flyt actually agrees with Gruber, but is predicting that if Apple were to have something to do with Color, Gruber's cynicism would disappear.
Unless I'm misunderstanding flyt, this was in no way an ad hominem argument.
It most certainly is ad hominem. The premise of Gruber's post is approximately that, based on the latest information we're learning about it, there's something distasteful about Color or its value proposition to consumers. The original commenter seeks to discredit Gruber's implied argument by suggesting he's an Apple apologist, that his industry analysis is not based on facts at hand but by inherent biases. This is right in the sweet spot of ad hominem. Just read the first few paragraphs of the Wikipedia entry on ad hominem to confirm.
Regardless, it's certainly poor form and disappointing to see so highly upvoted.
(You really should do "Who's on first?" sometime. :-)
I wonder how much that cost them...
So, I guess it's like Color in that it uses pictures, except that it's different in just about every other way.
I'm also curious what how his response (or others') would have been changed had Lisagor shot an ad for them. But, as a data point, Gruber hasn't linked to at least one of Lisagor's ads. (The 3D one for jawbone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exm981pbrJg)