3 ms·

Some of us don't cut Apple any more slack. I am rather tired of the free pass they seem to get from others. They are probably worse than MS in terms of vendor l

Some of us don't cut Apple any more slack. I am rather tired of the free pass they seem to get from others. They are probably worse than MS in terms of vendor lock-in but just don't have a large enough market share to bully people around.

BigZaphod 17y ago
I think the reason they get a lot more free passes is that their vendor lock-in actually works very well. When you have all Apple products in your house, stuff just kind of works together in ways that I never experienced with Microsoft's lock-in attempts. So you could argue that it's a bad thing, but unlike the way Microsoft tended to do it, Apple's way actually makes my life better for the most part.
- docgnome 17y ago
  True enough, but just because I get a better user experience in exchange for Freedom doesn't mean it's a good trade.
  - philwelch 17y ago
    I assume by "freedom" you mean the ability to mix and match components as you wish? ("Freedom" is a vague term.) Whether the user experience is worth giving up the ability to mix and match components can be measured easily: consider the value of each possible combination of components, and if the Apple combination has more value than other possible combinations, then it's worth it.
    - docgnome 17y ago
      What I really meant by Freedom is the ability to do whatever I want with the products I use but especially those I have to pay money for. If I buy a product, what right does the company that built the product have to dictate how I can use it? So included in that is the ability to mix and match devices. Now I'm not saying that Apple, or anyone else for that matter, has an obligation to support every possible combination in the universe, but by using well-documented, open standards for connecting devices and what naught, they make their device much more attractive. By inventing their own and keeping it closed, they force reverse-engineering and, as a result, cause frustration when they make breaking changes. While a company is, as I said, under no obligation to play nice in this way, I'm also under no obligation to buy their products. In theory "market forces" would solve this problem as the closed products would die. Eventually this may happen but, unfortunately, Openness and Freedom aren't valued by most people.
      - philwelch 17y ago
        You have the freedom to do whatever you wish with Apple's products, of course--but Apple has the freedom to design them however they wish. When you say "freedom", you mean "compelling Apple to make the design decisions you want". What I want as a creator is the freedom to design and build things the way I want to, and what I want as a customer is the freedom to buy and use products that are built from any number of design philosophies. If your design philosophy is so much better, let's see a combination of products built by that philosophy by as many vendors as you'd like that I'd prefer to my MacBook and iPhone. As it stands, Apple's design philosophy has made available to me a better product than I'd be able to buy otherwise. I'm not going to complain. They seem to know what they're doing better than their competitors, and I'm not fucking with that based on some damned ideology. Whether you brand that ideology with the name "Freedom" or "Puppies and Rainbows" or even "Eternal Bliss", it's just demagoguery.
  - GHFigs 17y ago
    How can you possibly tell what is a good trade when using nebulous terms like "Freedom"?
    - throw_away 17y ago
      is user experience not as nebulous (if not more) as well? to each his own, I say. I can't speak for you and vice versa on which trades are worth making. some people will pick A, and some will pick B. the winner is the guy who serves both A^B not AxorB.
      - GHFigs 17y ago
        is user experience not as nebulous (if not more) as well? No, it isn't. "Good user experience" is a just a fancy way of saying "people enjoy using it". Even if you can't fully articulate a rationale, you probably have a concrete idea about whether you enjoy or don't enjoy using a thing. A sharp knife has a better user experience than a dull knife. A cardboard box has a better user experience than plastic clamshells. It may not a thing you can point to, but the meaning is pretty easy to nail down, unlike "Freedom". * to each his own, I say.* You're not actually saying anything though. Of course people value different things, but unless you have some idea of what those things are, you may as well be talking nonsense, because you can't draw any sensible judgement on the value of an abstract concept over something concrete. I think this is important--and not just something to dismiss with "to each his own"--because nebulous terms like "Freedom" are often used to mask actual concrete demands like the legal right to modify and distribute someone else's work. "Freedom" is an idea I can get behind, but when it's code for something that I'm not so sure I agree with, then there's a problem with people using the two interchangeably. the winner is the guy who serves both A^B not AxorB But that guy competes with the guy who serves A^C, and the guy who serves B^C, etc. You cannot possibly appeal to every possible demand, which is why we have competition.
        throw_away 17y ago
        > No, it isn't. "Good user experience" is a just a fancy way of saying "people enjoy using it". Even if you can't fully articulate a rationale, you probably have a concrete idea about whether you enjoy or don't enjoy using a thing. A sharp knife has a better user experience than a dull knife. A cardboard box has a better user experience than plastic clamshells. It may not a thing you can point to, but the meaning is pretty easy to nail down, unlike "Freedom". But user experience is nebulous. The examples you give are obvious in the choice in which is better or worse, but, for example, I can't stand the blackberry interface because the fonts are ugly. now, someone who isn't a typography snob won't care. For me it has a poor user experience, but for others it does not. > You're not actually saying anything though. Of course people value different things, but unless you have some idea of what those things are, you may as well be talking nonsense, because you can't draw any sensible judgement on the value of an abstract concept over something concrete. What I am saying is that there is no accounting for taste. That a universal one-size-fits all judgment cannot be made. > But that guy competes with the guy who serves A^C, and the guy who serves B^C, etc. You cannot possibly appeal to every possible demand, which is why we have competition. I don't understand your point here. Clearly the winner is he who can satisfy A^B^C, and while perfection is an impossible goal, as entrepreneurs, we should strive to make as many happy customers as possible, given our constraints. My point boils down to two things: 1) as users of phones, we shouldn't get all bent out of shape in determining which is the best phone. It's fun & we tend to want to justify our own purchases & there is a sort of rooting-for-our-team aspect to it, but in the end it's pointless. some people like the nebulous concept of "freedom", while others like the nebulous concept of "slick". 2) as entrepreneurs, it's silly to pick sides based on what we want out of a phone as a user. instead, things like whether or not a market exists so that you can make money or whether or not the device has the necessary capabilities to support your idea should drive the decision. Our own biases and preferences as users should be secondary.
  - hyperbovine 17y ago
    Methinks that point is far more debatable than you are making it out to be...
slyn 17y ago
"They are probably worse than MS in terms of vendor lock-in but just don't have a large enough market share to bully people around." ? In the past couple years they created a cross platform multi-vendor open standard for GPU computing, they took a big risk by launching the iPhone without support for flash and have continued to be basically the only major company giving adobe any pressure to improve its shit-tastic platform, they have (granted extremely slowly) improved their iPhone development program from basically non-existant to acceptable in a sadistic way (and if the trend continues it might actually be good within a year or two), they mostly got rid of DRM from iTunes, and most recently they opened up their SDK for making the iTunes LP things (which will likely be of importance when (if ever) the iTablet/iSlate comes out). The only two (somewhat related) things Apple does that I would classify as vendor lock-in are 1: XCode, and therefore OS X, is required for iPhone development, and 2: You need a Mac to run OS X. I would consider these to be more of an issue if Apple preemptively put a stop to #2 through activation checks or some WGA-esque program, but they don't. As long as you aren't going around selling preinstalled copies of OS X on non-Apple hardware, Apple could seemingly care less. Microsoft in recent history hasn't been bad either, they still have WGA, and there was the whole OOXML thing, but other than those two things I can't think of anything they have done that has caused an e-uproar. Personally I would put the two (Apple and MS) roughly equal to each other in terms of Evil.
- Niten 17y ago
  "The only two (somewhat related) things Apple does that I would classify as vendor lock-in are 1: XCode, and therefore OS X, is required for iPhone development, and 2: You need a Mac to run OS X." What about the fact that they actively sabotage efforts to make the iPod work with music library managers other than iTunes, or to make iTunes work with MP3 players other than the iPod?
  - philwelch 17y ago
    A lot of this is overplayed. You use a security flaw in iTunes/iPod/iPhone to connect to it, Apple closes the security flaw. Apple decides to change how any of these components interface to each other, third party stuff stops working. Frankly, I would be very surprised if Apple cared at all about things like gtkpod working or not. There is some simplification of effort involved when Apple assumes that iTunes and iPod are an integrated system that doesn't need to talk to anything else, and if you don't want to buy into that ecosystem there are tons of viable competitors. Deliberately positioning your products as a closed system is fine. Apple has better things to do than worry about backwards compatibility with iTunes/iPod external API's.
andrewljohnson 17y ago
Vendor lock in is not evil, in of itself. Almost every single product in the world is proprietary. The problem with Microsoft's lock-in is they controlled 98% of desktop computing. I would argue vendor lock-in even leads to better products, since the developer don't have to worry about interoperability. Monopolies are the real problem. Apple can go have it's little slice of the cellphone market for all I care. Google is getting monopolistically scary though.
- docgnome 17y ago
  "I would argue vendor lock-in even leads to better products, since the developer don't have to worry about interoperability. Monopolies are the real problem." Aren't monopolies the logical conclusion of vendor lock-in that is allowed to flourish? By your logic, monopolies are even better for developers because they they REALLY never have to worry about interoperability.

BigZaphod 17y ago

I think the reason they get a lot more free passes is that their vendor lock-in actually works very well. When you have all Apple products in your house, stuff just kind of works together in ways that I never experienced with Microsoft's lock-in attempts. So you could argue that it's a bad thing, but unlike the way Microsoft tended to do it, Apple's way actually makes my life better for the most part.

docgnome 17y ago
True enough, but just because I get a better user experience in exchange for Freedom doesn't mean it's a good trade.
- philwelch 17y ago
  I assume by "freedom" you mean the ability to mix and match components as you wish? ("Freedom" is a vague term.) Whether the user experience is worth giving up the ability to mix and match components can be measured easily: consider the value of each possible combination of components, and if the Apple combination has more value than other possible combinations, then it's worth it.
  - docgnome 17y ago
    What I really meant by Freedom is the ability to do whatever I want with the products I use but especially those I have to pay money for. If I buy a product, what right does the company that built the product have to dictate how I can use it? So included in that is the ability to mix and match devices. Now I'm not saying that Apple, or anyone else for that matter, has an obligation to support every possible combination in the universe, but by using well-documented, open standards for connecting devices and what naught, they make their device much more attractive. By inventing their own and keeping it closed, they force reverse-engineering and, as a result, cause frustration when they make breaking changes. While a company is, as I said, under no obligation to play nice in this way, I'm also under no obligation to buy their products. In theory "market forces" would solve this problem as the closed products would die. Eventually this may happen but, unfortunately, Openness and Freedom aren't valued by most people.
    - philwelch 17y ago
      You have the freedom to do whatever you wish with Apple's products, of course--but Apple has the freedom to design them however they wish. When you say "freedom", you mean "compelling Apple to make the design decisions you want". What I want as a creator is the freedom to design and build things the way I want to, and what I want as a customer is the freedom to buy and use products that are built from any number of design philosophies. If your design philosophy is so much better, let's see a combination of products built by that philosophy by as many vendors as you'd like that I'd prefer to my MacBook and iPhone. As it stands, Apple's design philosophy has made available to me a better product than I'd be able to buy otherwise. I'm not going to complain. They seem to know what they're doing better than their competitors, and I'm not fucking with that based on some damned ideology. Whether you brand that ideology with the name "Freedom" or "Puppies and Rainbows" or even "Eternal Bliss", it's just demagoguery.
- GHFigs 17y ago
  How can you possibly tell what is a good trade when using nebulous terms like "Freedom"?
  - throw_away 17y ago
    is user experience not as nebulous (if not more) as well? to each his own, I say. I can't speak for you and vice versa on which trades are worth making. some people will pick A, and some will pick B. the winner is the guy who serves both A^B not AxorB.
    - GHFigs 17y ago
      is user experience not as nebulous (if not more) as well? No, it isn't. "Good user experience" is a just a fancy way of saying "people enjoy using it". Even if you can't fully articulate a rationale, you probably have a concrete idea about whether you enjoy or don't enjoy using a thing. A sharp knife has a better user experience than a dull knife. A cardboard box has a better user experience than plastic clamshells. It may not a thing you can point to, but the meaning is pretty easy to nail down, unlike "Freedom". * to each his own, I say.* You're not actually saying anything though. Of course people value different things, but unless you have some idea of what those things are, you may as well be talking nonsense, because you can't draw any sensible judgement on the value of an abstract concept over something concrete. I think this is important--and not just something to dismiss with "to each his own"--because nebulous terms like "Freedom" are often used to mask actual concrete demands like the legal right to modify and distribute someone else's work. "Freedom" is an idea I can get behind, but when it's code for something that I'm not so sure I agree with, then there's a problem with people using the two interchangeably. the winner is the guy who serves both A^B not AxorB But that guy competes with the guy who serves A^C, and the guy who serves B^C, etc. You cannot possibly appeal to every possible demand, which is why we have competition.
      - throw_away 17y ago
        > No, it isn't. "Good user experience" is a just a fancy way of saying "people enjoy using it". Even if you can't fully articulate a rationale, you probably have a concrete idea about whether you enjoy or don't enjoy using a thing. A sharp knife has a better user experience than a dull knife. A cardboard box has a better user experience than plastic clamshells. It may not a thing you can point to, but the meaning is pretty easy to nail down, unlike "Freedom". But user experience is nebulous. The examples you give are obvious in the choice in which is better or worse, but, for example, I can't stand the blackberry interface because the fonts are ugly. now, someone who isn't a typography snob won't care. For me it has a poor user experience, but for others it does not. > You're not actually saying anything though. Of course people value different things, but unless you have some idea of what those things are, you may as well be talking nonsense, because you can't draw any sensible judgement on the value of an abstract concept over something concrete. What I am saying is that there is no accounting for taste. That a universal one-size-fits all judgment cannot be made. > But that guy competes with the guy who serves A^C, and the guy who serves B^C, etc. You cannot possibly appeal to every possible demand, which is why we have competition. I don't understand your point here. Clearly the winner is he who can satisfy A^B^C, and while perfection is an impossible goal, as entrepreneurs, we should strive to make as many happy customers as possible, given our constraints. My point boils down to two things: 1) as users of phones, we shouldn't get all bent out of shape in determining which is the best phone. It's fun & we tend to want to justify our own purchases & there is a sort of rooting-for-our-team aspect to it, but in the end it's pointless. some people like the nebulous concept of "freedom", while others like the nebulous concept of "slick". 2) as entrepreneurs, it's silly to pick sides based on what we want out of a phone as a user. instead, things like whether or not a market exists so that you can make money or whether or not the device has the necessary capabilities to support your idea should drive the decision. Our own biases and preferences as users should be secondary.
- hyperbovine 17y ago
  Methinks that point is far more debatable than you are making it out to be...

slyn 17y ago

"They are probably worse than MS in terms of vendor lock-in but just don't have a large enough market share to bully people around." ? In the past couple years they created a cross platform multi-vendor open standard for GPU computing, they took a big risk by launching the iPhone without support for flash and have continued to be basically the only major company giving adobe any pressure to improve its shit-tastic platform, they have (granted extremely slowly) improved their iPhone development program from basically non-existant to acceptable in a sadistic way (and if the trend continues it might actually be good within a year or two), they mostly got rid of DRM from iTunes, and most recently they opened up their SDK for making the iTunes LP things (which will likely be of importance when (if ever) the iTablet/iSlate comes out). The only two (somewhat related) things Apple does that I would classify as vendor lock-in are 1: XCode, and therefore OS X, is required for iPhone development, and 2: You need a Mac to run OS X. I would consider these to be more of an issue if Apple preemptively put a stop to #2 through activation checks or some WGA-esque program, but they don't. As long as you aren't going around selling preinstalled copies of OS X on non-Apple hardware, Apple could seemingly care less. Microsoft in recent history hasn't been bad either, they still have WGA, and there was the whole OOXML thing, but other than those two things I can't think of anything they have done that has caused an e-uproar. Personally I would put the two (Apple and MS) roughly equal to each other in terms of Evil.

Niten 17y ago
"The only two (somewhat related) things Apple does that I would classify as vendor lock-in are 1: XCode, and therefore OS X, is required for iPhone development, and 2: You need a Mac to run OS X." What about the fact that they actively sabotage efforts to make the iPod work with music library managers other than iTunes, or to make iTunes work with MP3 players other than the iPod?
- philwelch 17y ago
  A lot of this is overplayed. You use a security flaw in iTunes/iPod/iPhone to connect to it, Apple closes the security flaw. Apple decides to change how any of these components interface to each other, third party stuff stops working. Frankly, I would be very surprised if Apple cared at all about things like gtkpod working or not. There is some simplification of effort involved when Apple assumes that iTunes and iPod are an integrated system that doesn't need to talk to anything else, and if you don't want to buy into that ecosystem there are tons of viable competitors. Deliberately positioning your products as a closed system is fine. Apple has better things to do than worry about backwards compatibility with iTunes/iPod external API's.

andrewljohnson 17y ago

Vendor lock in is not evil, in of itself. Almost every single product in the world is proprietary. The problem with Microsoft's lock-in is they controlled 98% of desktop computing. I would argue vendor lock-in even leads to better products, since the developer don't have to worry about interoperability. Monopolies are the real problem. Apple can go have it's little slice of the cellphone market for all I care. Google is getting monopolistically scary though.

docgnome 17y ago
"I would argue vendor lock-in even leads to better products, since the developer don't have to worry about interoperability. Monopolies are the real problem." Aren't monopolies the logical conclusion of vendor lock-in that is allowed to flourish? By your logic, monopolies are even better for developers because they they REALLY never have to worry about interoperability.