Screwing Up

On the ride home today, I passed the same ad I pass every day: an ad for Android Apps. Google’s adver­tis­ing dom­i­nance of a mar­ket which Apple cre­ated. The papers (blogs) are full of com­plaints, and there’s been a def­i­nite mood shift. Before, peo­ple had a love/hate rela­tion­ship with Apple: they loved how awe­some the prod­ucts are, and did so in spite of the lim­i­ta­tions. Now that they’ve got­ten accli­mated to the prod­ucts, the awe­some­ness has worn off, and — as with all tech­nol­ogy — the longer it lives, the more peo­ple try to do with it, and thus the more con­strict­ing the lim­i­ta­tions seem. So the love fades, and all that’s left is the hate.

The rea­son is very sim­ple: Apple chose con­trol over open­ness, and they’re pay­ing for it. The exclu­sive deal with AT&T meant they were stuck using the absolute worst wire­less net­work, the shod­di­ness of which meant turn­ing off users. The App Store big brother turned off devel­op­ers and the tech saavy — the same thought lead­ers that Google catered (and I’d say still caters) to, the ones that went around switch­ing everyone’s default home page from Yahoo! a decade ago…

3 Responses

  3. Numpty says:
    2010-06-02 at 12:00 pm

    “They’re pay­ing for it?” Boy, I wish I could make that much money while I was pay­ing for something.

    Apple are what they are. They’re actu­ally quite happy for you to buy some­thing else if you don’t like what they do, because it helps their prod­ucts main­tain that air of exclu­siv­ity. If they weren’t ridicu­lously suc­cess­ful, nobody would care about their app store control-freakery.

    Personally, I haven’t detected any of the shift that you claim is hap­pen­ing… sounds more like wish­ful think­ing from the Apple bash­ers. I know more peo­ple than ever who own Apple prod­ucts, and they invari­ably love them, many months and years after pur­chase. The vast major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion are quite delighted to pay extra for some­thing that looks good and just works, know­ing that it will always just work pre­cisely *because* they aren’t given the free­dom to do or install any­thing that will mess it up.

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