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Comment by randomsearch | Hacker News Reader

I think the question is - better for who?

Clearly for many businesses, walled gardens, avoiding "openness", works. That might be because they use it to create an artificial moat to protect their business (arguably LinkedIn here), or because it's the best way to serve their customers (Steve Jobs' argument, not saying I agree).

For customers, if the best experience is gained through a native app, then a native app makes sense from the company's point of view. This is why native apps took off in the first place, right?

Just because you or I believe in open standards and information sharing doesn't mean it's better from everyone's point of view.

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As much as the tech world loves to hate Apple, walled gardens are a huge part of why their stuff 'just works'.

Suppose you want an app to play videos. If your app uses a custom format no problem. If you support an open standard, the file might not, it might require more processing power than you have, it's probably for a different screen resolution, it...

In the end tech people are willing to trade stuff breaking occasionally for flexibility, but most people flip out when stuff breaks.

PS: I think you can break it down as do you want a VCR to show a movie to your friends, or a VCR that gives you an excuse to tinker.

Nonsense. Why does Apple have their own plug format instead of supporting USB? Is it somehow better? Easier? Blatantly not. This is just vendor lock in, the opposite of the fundamental ethic of the Internet.

USB ∉ Internet

> Is it somehow better?

Apple's magsafe and lighting adapter plugs are far better than USB connectors. They are reversible and don't have tabs to break off on the device side.

Tabs?

http://cdn.ndtv.com/tech/images/gadgets/Samsung_Galaxy_S5_fl...

If you look close at in the connector on this S5 you can see there are two separate 'tabs' that are rather fragile if you are not careful removing and inserting your power cable. I've seen these break on phones before.

http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8554/DSC_1380.jpg

The iphone connector has no small fragile pieces like that.

I really hate to admit it, but I love the lighting adapter. Blows micro USB out of the water.

While their plug can be defended on engineering grounds, I'd ask a different question - why lock down Bluetooth to Apple devices only? iPhones were perfectly able to exchange data with non-Apple devices until at some point they weren't.

You can still use iPhones with car's built in systems so it's not really Apple only.

If you mean accessories like wireless keyboards I think the same 'just works' arguments directly apply. There are lot's of terrable 3rd party products out there.

Of you redefine "just works" as "just works if you own a product from our carefully curated list of authorized accessories", then yes...

Apple's 30 pin connector was pretty much always superior - it could do Audio/Video output natively, and also had pins for media control,so other manufacturers could add media support according to one established standard. As for the Lightning connector - it's reversible. That's "better" enough for me.

I want a VCR that can play any VHS I have and that I can plug to any TV I can find - not something that plays only iCassettes on BananaCRT which is expensive and my friends don't have.

Okay. That's what you want. Some people think that iCassettes have better picture quality and BananaCRTs have better ascetics and they find the overall user experience of iCassette players and BananaCRTs integrates together better than buying a VHS deck and a TV from different manufacturers and having to figure out how to hook up the standard but confusing connector all by yourself. Those people get to buy things too. And if the market is dominated by products that cater to their wants and not yours, maybe it's because your wants are in the minority.

Does it need to play video's from ArVid VHS tapes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid

So, your happy with the VHS and don't need to play Beta tapes.

PS: Sounds like your happy with a walled guarden and want something that just works. Did you get a Blueray player or a conbo that also handels HD-DVD's?

Slightly different, I think. VHS and Beta were competing formats, but you could play any VHS tape in any VHS player. That was the point the parent was making, I think.

Sure, I muddled the point but ArVid VHS tapes ARE VHS tapes. Like how some CD players also let you use MP3 CD’s.

DVDs have been region locked for a long time, and yet still took off.

I wonder how much of that we owe to the fact that people were finding ways around region locking, and that DVDs were also used for software distributions.

I'm willing to bet that the number of people working around region locking was so small (in a financial sense) that it didn't matter.

Don't Macs let you switch regions a limited number of times?

You just can't prove that... Maybe because is by far not true.

For example, you can create an app that only uses LAME + VideoLAN encoders and supports two of their formats, MP3 and MPEG4 nothing else, cause you're sure those work on the hardware you're building, that's exactly what Apple does, and Ubuntu, and Windows.

Just use your LOGIC how the hell is an open protocol the reason why stuff breaks? If everyone is looking at it and it goes through a lot more review than closed standards, they're the reason why we have the internet and how it works.

Contrary to what you believe on, Apple actually uses tons of open protocols and standards, they made Webkit what it is, that's free and open source, they still work on it as far as I know, they have their fair share of closed ones too, but open has worked for them pretty well.

HTML is an open standard, try writing a strict HTML browser that fails on non-standard pages and then surfing the web. There is a huge difference between using HTML files internally generated by a process you control and trying to read anything calling its self an HTML file.

The same applies to MPEG4 there are plenty of files that work on one player but not another. EX: Wait you also want to open an 8k MPEG4 file on a phone?

PS: I wish everyone that suggests open solutions actually needed to implement one. Generally, when people say open solutions they really mean leverage some huge chunk of code that someone else wrote, or let me leverage your hardware and software for free.

Or a VCR that plays BETAMAX? (maybe a better analogy)

> their stuff 'just works'.

It doesn't, though. Apple hardware and software are fragile, buggy, and crash-prone. They beachball at the slightest provocation and destroy work with abandon.

And aside from that, well, "You're holding it wrong." If it only works for one narrow workflow, it doesn't work; it's a toy solution for a stripped-down toy problem.

Native apps and open standards are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, there are ways to make the data exportable both on the app side and cloud side. The reason companies tend to go for their own protocols is mostly greed. "Because why should I support RSS if I can't monetize it?". That's basically exploiting the common good without giving anything back.

I don't think it's fair to describe that as greed. The fact that a business can't monetise a service it provides is a bad thing; if Twitter for example provided access to everything over an RSS feed, the first thing you'd see would be applications that simply stripped or refused to display advertising etc.

I don't see why it 'exploits the common good' to want to charge or monetise a service you provide.

Huh, access to Twitter's API is one of the reasons that Twitter took off, then they started locking that down, adding restrictions meant to destroy alternative clients, because advertising.

To me this is a breach of trust - i.e. the underdogs are all about openness, they're growing based on the goodwill of the early adopters, then once they get big, they forget about openness. Personally I couldn't give a damn about Twitter's need to monetize, they should have thought about that since the beginning, before promising things they couldn't deliver and growing based on the generated trust.

Twitter is not alone in this, there are many other offenders, including Apple and Google. And they should really pay attention to what happened in the past, because once you piss off a significant portion of the industry, you can only go downhill from there. Companies like Microsoft can testify for that and oh look, they are the underdogs again.

> the first thing you'd see would be applications that simply stripped or refused to display advertising etc.

There already are Twitter apps for phones that don't display advertising.

In the past, Twitter did provide RSS feeds of your status updates.

One of my favorite features of the RSS reader I use is that it can hook up to a Twitter list, effectively giving me back an RSS feed of tweets.

(Previously I'd been scraping together Yahoo Pipes or Google App Engine based things people had made, each of which would work for about six months before something finicky would break 'em...)

> I don't see why it 'exploits the common good' to want to charge or monetise a service you provide.

To charge your users, no, of course not.

To charge advertisers and make your users products instead of customers, that's where the problem is.

(And part of the problem is that users have become so conditioned to getting services like Twitter and Facebook and Google for free that the idea of having to pay for those services would shock them.)

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