The Pendulum Swings, Again
The most interesting thing about these recent trends is human nature.<p>I remember back in year 2000/2001 how everybody was talking about freedom, open-source and the open nature of the Internet. I remember how the closed garden that Microsoft tried to create was frowned upon. Small companies that were picking the Internet as a delivery platform and using open-source/multi-platform technologies were on the forefront of innovation. Of course regular consumers and businesses never cared, but as Paul Graham once said, if you want to see the future trends in computing, you have to look at what hackers are using today.<p>Then OS X happened, this UNIX-compatible OS that was shiny and cool and all of your UNIX tools were compatible with it and you could run some pretty important proprietary software too, like MS Office or Photoshop. It was more productive for developers than Windows. Compared to Linux it was friendlier to all people. And suddenly Apple was hip again and it slowly captured the hearts of developers.<p>Then the iPhone happened and people didn't mind that it was a closed garden, because there has never been anything like it. Anything that Apple allowed on this new platform, it was taken as a gift, as it was their platform, so if they wanted to ban an app for "duplicating existing functionality" then openness be damned, it was their product after all. Then the stories about lone developers getting rich on the App Store happened, and people didn't mind being at the behest of Apple, as long as they could have some piece of that awesome pie.<p>Of course, countless of reasons were given by tech pundits, trying to rationalize the walled garden they've created - it is better for grandmas that have their PCs ridden with viruses, it is better for the protection of our children, it exposes computing to a wider mass (even though computing in this context means mostly consumption), it solves the problem of app marketing for individual developers without huge marketing budgets, etc... there's always some reason for why Apple was right to act the way it did. Even now that they've released a shitty GMaps replacement, some genuinely believe that they had no choice, when for a company like Apple there are always choices available.<p>Let's not forget for a moment the ultimate argument against this closed garden: if you don't like it, you are free to go somewhere else.<p>And now Apple started suing left and right, which in my opinion is what companies do when finding themselves in the innovator's dilemma, and is doing so while dropping the ball on new versions of its products. They are still successful and they might produce some more golden eggs in the future, but the innovation frenzy of the iPod era is over and they know it.<p>And yet people still cheer for them, even though as far as openness is concerned, Apple makes Microsoft look good. And it was only 12 years ago that people hated Microsoft with a passion for being an obstacle to innovation, even though Microsoft never banned any app from running on Windows or restricted its usage only to certain hardware (but surprise, since Apple has been doing it so successfully, Microsoft is going to start doing it with Windows 8 ... hurray for the renewed and totally not evil Microsoft).<p>I own an Android phone and an iPad. I love my iPad, but it was a gift and I secretly yearn for a Nexus tablet that has the same size + 3G. I also voted with my wallet against apps like Instagram, because I'm primarily an Android user and the aesthetic senses of developers like Marco don't really solve any my problems.<p>I also remember the day I got my Galaxy S, even though I owned an iPhone 3GS ... I got out of my way to buy one out of frustration because Apple was banning apps for blocking calls and SMS messages from specific phone numbers (but hey, look how it "just works"). And I predict similar frustration levels as use-cases for my iPad are unfolding. Already I'm pretty pissed off about my carrier having the ability to enable/disable the tethering option on my iPad.<p>If this is the future of computing, then I shudder to think of the consequences.