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Microsoft, as evil as they may be, have always had a rather open eco system. Even when Windows was at its prime, you didn't have to get permission to develop or install applications on the platform.
WP7 apps have to be approved.
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Thats no different than Microsoft in the 90's. The business goals are different but the strategy of getting there is the same.
I don't feel this situation is the same. Microsoft didn't win for two decades by nibbling small potatoes off of everyone else's plate, they won by persecuting swallowing entire industries that were evolving rapidly. Word processing, fileserving, WWW access, telephony, video gaming, SQL, e-mail, ad infinitum... Instapaper is not an industry of this scope - it's a single webbrowsing feature.
If Microsoft added a feature to Windows that duplicated a popular application's functionality, developers would be screaming bloody murder and rioting in the, er, blogs and web forums Utter rot. This used to happen all the time in the 1980s and 1990s, before the DoJ anti trust lawsuit really got rolling. It was most obvious in office apps (ever wonder where the third-party spelling checkers and grammar checkers went?…
>This used to happen all the time in the 1980s and 1990s, before the DoJ anti trust lawsuit really got rolling. Yes, and the reason for the DOJ anti-trust lawsuit? Developers were screaming bloody murder.
It strikes me that this is exactly the position every web developer has with google. Google can arbitrarily and capriciously exclude them from their index. When google excludes you from the index, there is no appeal, there is no explanation, and, unlike Apple, google will not publish a set of (reliable) rules. (It gives a lot of advice but is inconsistent.) Also, like Apple, if you are not able to get in the big leag…
>> Google can arbitrarily and capriciously exclude them from their index. As a web developer on SEO forums, I hear of these cases all the time, but when you analyze these sites, usually 1 of 3 things is happening: - Web developer(s) made a mistake, causing a (search engine) accessibility problem. - The site is in violation of the Google webmaster guidelines. - The site lacks (unique) content, or otherwise doesn't con…
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Seeing as Metro/Win8 is MS last desperate push to enter the market for tablets that in the near future will replace the market where they currently hold almost all their monopolies (the desktop), that's a very accurate description of what will most likely happen. And seeing as Windows is not and never was an OS for power users, they will lose the remaining desktop niche - which will be populated by exactly those powe…
A lot of Windows users do consider themselves power users even if they have minimal knowledge of other platforms. For example, it's quite frustrating to participate in PC building or gaming communities where every schmo thinks they're an authority on computing.
Nobody has a monopoly on ideas.
If Microsoft added a feature to Windows that duplicated a popular application's functionality, developers would be screaming bloody murder and rioting in the, er, blogs and web forums Utter rot. This used to happen all the time in the 1980s and 1990s, before the DoJ anti trust lawsuit really got rolling. It was most obvious in office apps (ever wonder where the third-party spelling checkers and grammar checkers went?…
>This used to happen all the time in the 1980s and 1990s, before the DoJ anti trust lawsuit really got rolling. Yes, and the reason for the DOJ anti-trust lawsuit? Developers were screaming bloody murder.
"Angry developers" enter into this in no meaningful sense. To the players actually involved in that fight, on all sides, developers were simply cogs.
Apple doesn't hold a monopoly on mobile operating systems and, even if it did, it would take more than simply putting someone out of business with a new offering to put it on the wrong side of the law. It's easy to see that once a company gets as big as Apple, any new feature it builds is going to put someone out of business somewhere.
(Instapaper will be fine, by the way).
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> I would rather have someone make sure (for free) that the app that I download isn't buggy, or crash-y, or other stuff. Hello, apt-get and yum. Curated software doesn't have to lead to locked-down systems you can only use at the sufferance of the curators. For example, look at the processes behind Linux distros. The people who put Linux distros together have been doing this for nigh on twenty years now, with the big…
Lock-down? Open? If by open you mean extensible, that's what all those APIs are for. If by open you mean open source, that's a different debate all together - an easy argument against it would be Linux. If by open you mean where you can take the battery out and put in SD cards - I have a Nexus One and I've never done those things on it, although I could, but never had to take the battery out (and do what?). And no I…
Linux doesn't have the concept of 'jailbreak'. That's what I mean.
If Microsoft added a feature to Windows that duplicated a popular application's functionality, developers would be screaming bloody murder and rioting in the, er, blogs and web forums Utter rot. This used to happen all the time in the 1980s and 1990s, before the DoJ anti trust lawsuit really got rolling. It was most obvious in office apps (ever wonder where the third-party spelling checkers and grammar checkers went?…
Recently on HN there was a post saying that you shouldn't chase anything obvious and generic without expecting it to get 'filled in'. A cloud service for audio? Yep, when the big players get around to it, you're out. An imaging collation app for dentists? The big players are not going to do that.
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True - I was responding to his assertion midway that if Windows had preempted a popular app, people would scream. It's just not true.
Remember when hordes of WinZip enthusiasts flooded messageboards with angry complaints after XP was released with that functionality built in? Neither do I.