Sleep And Water

This is all very damning. Apple is abusing its market dominance, restricting user rights in order to promote profits. A theme endemic to technology unfortunately made familiar by its competitor in other markets. Apple’s bizarre hyper-controlling is really…annoying.

All reasons why I am that much more disappointed with the G1. Unlike its competitor, whose dominance was based primarily on (questionable) business strategy, Apple’s dominance springs from apparently untouchable superiority of design. The G1 just doesn’t match up to the sleek minimalist perfection of the iphone—it looks clunky. I’d like to play with one to see if the feel isn’t better, but unfortunately I can’t wait. Come October 1, I’m buying an iphone.

I’m not paying hundreds of dollars for the ideal of openess. But hopefully all this reaction will eventually force Apple to open up.

Oh, actually I was referring to Microsoft. Looking back, that may have been a bit oblique. I have nothing against google. Other than the fact that their UI design is a lot more satisfactory on the web than high end consumer electronics….

Microsoft, then Apple. It’s like the minority party that comes into power and…starts doing all the shit that made the people kick out their opposition in the first place.

Maybe Apple doesn’t have anything to fear from the G1, but they should be scared spitless by the Android OS. Eventually some phone manufacturer is going to make a phone as aesthetically pleasing as the Iphone, but with the openness of Android.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/KJc2urez7D8/

I don’t agree with everything there, in fact, not even the general sentiment, but it sets up an opinion pole pretty nicely.

“I also think it’s unjustified to call Google’s business strategy questionable. You may disapprove of all advertising, and that’s fine, but Google way improved the state of advertising across the web, and made them far less objectionable. Innovation is rewarded.

I don’t know of an example of Google doing anything at the level of oppressiveness that Apple is exhibiting.”

I was seriously waiting for a punchline here. Have you read the terms of use of any Google product? Look at Google App Engine:

6. Proprietary Rights

6.1. You acknowledge and agree that Google (or Google’s licensors) own all legal right, title and interest in and to the Service, including any intellectual property rights which subsist in the Service (whether those rights happen to be registered or not, and wherever in the world those rights may exist).

Or what about the debacle about Google Chrome before they backed down?

Google may have changed online advertising but it’s hard for me to swallow that they improved it – unless you like subversive advertising. That’s like saying that Cable TV networks are improving advertising by inducing more product placement in response to Tivo. Google basically set the stage for a complete lack of privacy in everything we do online. When you have to worry about what’s going to happen when you change your relationship status on Facebook for an hour, you can blame Google for introducing us that model in the first place.

Also consider that Pagerank is completely proprietary and if you have an online business, Google is more or less the only game in town that matters. If you get blackballed from Pagerank, there is no one to appeal to. What about the horror stories about people getting locked out of their Gmail accounts? Can you imagine all your e-mail just disappearing with more or less no recourse? That’s entirely a possibility if you use Gmail as your primary e-mail account. I don’t know about you, but Gmail is a mirror of my primary e-mail, for this exact reason.

I mean, maybe preaching to you about privacy concerns is a little silly, but you have to agree that Google’s Do No Evil policy is at least questionable nowadays.

App Store has many, many flaws but consider how many privacy concerns have come up even with Apple’s iron grip on the applications. Do you really think an open source model is going to magically fix all that? Just because everyone can do a security audit doesn’t necessarily mean that anybody does.

I just feel like there’s a weird double standard going on here. Microsoft has made Visual Studio Express free to anybody who wants to develop, where’s the article praising that? Where’s the article knocking Wii Ware for not opening up their platform and instead having the exact same review process as Apple, especially considering people have struggled for years with Nintendo and developed amazing homebrew despite Nintendo’s efforts to the contrary.

I know about Google’s different EULA debacles. Google has a legal department which isn’t always in step with the values or desires of their product teams. Google’s reactions vary with each privacy debacle – sometimes, they add a page to the help docs explaining a controversial part of the EULA (Google Docs and IP ownership) – or they back down entirely (Chrome) – or they open up somewhat but not all the way (PageRank) – or they try to publicly defend their policies, and don’t budge until many months too late (Google search and YouTube personal data retention).

That’s a range of poor to mediocre to great reactions, but all of them are superior to Apple’s reaction – when people complain about their rejection letters, add an NDA to rejection letters and clamp down even more. That’s a fundamental difference in philosophy, and seeing Google publicly struggle with business vs. community vs. legal vs. ethical issues gives me an order of magnitude more trust in them than Apple, who deals with such quandaries through sheer market muscle. Sure, I still have reservations at times and depending on the service, but in the end, I trust Google.

Also – potentially being locked out of your email is not something specific to Google; that is a problem of all web based mail, and the free service of POP and IMAP many of them offer is one way of mitigating it. Contextual ads are completely superior to pop-unders, and differ fundamentally from product placement. Not disclosing that your search results are placed, like some shady adware engines do, is the proper analagous practice to product placement.

Sure, I’m pissed at Nintendo for not following through on Wii Ware the way that everybody thought they would/should, and I think MS has been doing a lot of things right lately (supporting OpenOffice standards, IE8 standards mode defaults, Visual Studio Express), and I recognize and internalize these things. I speak highly of IE7 and IE8 (often to the mocking of friends and coworkers), and I’m finally ready to buy an Xbox 360.

No, of course open source models aren’t going to “fix” privacy concerns. Is privacy solved on the “real” Internet? It’s not a problem that the mobile web needs to solve, and that’s the real point I’m getting at. Apple building a kill switch is assuming responsibility they shouldn’t need or have. Of course it’s their right to build as proprietary a platform as they want. And Apple developers can believe that it’s better if mobile Internet development is best left only to serious people.

But I have every right to describe what is so lacking in that outlook. I believe that a closed platform will fall prey to an open platform that has enough backing, and that this is exactly the time and place for Google, T-Mobile, and the Open Handset Alliance to introduce just that.