11–20 of 92 posts
Just as Google has tried to do with its search engine, Apple is building a system that makes it easy to find quality content. Content that is legal, age rated and doesn't harm your devices. A lot of families value those qualities over 'absolute freedom'.
Exhibit A: iTunes (the service) is essentially blocked off from being accessed by people who don't have iTunes (the program) installed. This becomes VERY obvious if you run Linux. The App Store and the iTune music library are not easily searchable or browseable from your Linux PC. 3rd party websites that do this instead aren't really the point, either.
Microsoft is (or was) really good at backwards compatibility (and making it easy to import other formats into their own). This is their weakness: they are focused on getting content into their own formats.
Facebook's strength is to get people to impart information into their system. Their weakness is in always trying to make it public (or at the least visible to anyone you friend)
Exhibit A: iTunes (the service) is essentially blocked off from being accessed by people who don't have iTunes (the program) installed. This becomes VERY obvious if you run Linux. The App Store and the iTune music library are not easily searchable or browseable from your Linux PC. 3rd party websites that do this instead aren't really the point, either.
Regardless, I think your exhibit is more easily explained by Apple understanding exactly who is likely to spend money and making them want to be their customers. I'm a huge Debian fanatic, but I have to admit that the linux users are the most tight-fisted demographic I've ever seen.
Pretty sure people have been working on this problem for a while, and it won't be solved anytime soon.
iOS tries hard to make web apps first class citizens. And the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript parts that make this possible are in HTML5. It's not that Apple doesn't understand the internet, it's that many geeks want "native" apps, rather than having web apps on mobile devices. Apple tolerates these apps, but just barely, and offers the web as the way out of their walled garden.
Geeks wanting native apps, and Apple reluctantly going along may have been the case when the iPhone & App Store first began, but Apple has long since realized that the app channel is very valuable to users and to the platform, and that control over that channel will be hugely profitable.
If Apple really wanted to have webapps be first class iOS citizens, they would provide Phonegap capabilities standardized in the native browser (http://www.phonegap.com/).
iOS tries hard to make web apps first class citizens. And the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript parts that make this possible are in HTML5. It's not that Apple doesn't understand the internet, it's that many geeks want "native" apps, rather than having web apps on mobile devices. Apple tolerates these apps, but just barely, and offers the web as the way out of their walled garden.
>Apple tolerates these [native] apps, but just barely, and offers the web as the way out of their walled garden. Geeks wanting native apps, and Apple reluctantly going along may have been the case when the iPhone & App Store first began, but Apple has long since realized that the app channel is very valuable to users and to the platform, and that control over that channel will be hugely profitable. If Apple really wa…
I'd venture to say the internet doesn't get Apple. Many geeks are just anti anything Apple, and have an irrational hatred for them. Apple have made huge contributions to the internet, such as Webkit, promoting web standards, the iPhone and yes, even the iTunes store - still the biggest internet-based media distribution channel.
Nearly every geek I know has a MBP, and every startup I've worked at uses the same.