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I certainly agree with the statement "1 Company will never and should never control the way people access information" if we're talking about a single company c

I certainly agree with the statement "1 Company will never and should never control the way people access information" if we're talking about a single company controlling access for all people, such as would be the situation if Apple (or Blackberry or Microsoft, etc) were the only phone provider. But I'm far less ready to say that there should not be any phones on the market that have restrictions on them regarding what code is allowed to execute. It seems to me that this is a legitimate choice for consumers to make and it's OK for them to be allowed to make it as long as there are also non-restricted phones available. Diversity here is good - it's not clear to me that the best user experience in practice always comes from systems that are unrestricted. I'm happy the experiment gets to compete in the free market and see how it goes as long as other options are available.

chc 17y ago
That isn't what's happening, though. Apple is easily among the best of the best at making cool things — this is debatable, but it's close enough to true that I hope it won't be too controversial. The coolness of Apple's things is orthogonal to whether they're open or closed. Apple sells people on this coolness, and they don't know what they're missing that they could have in an open system. It's much like the "blub problem" — when you're using something that works for you and that's all you know, it's easy to miss ways it could be better. If people were free to sell their own iPhones with customized iPhone OSen and app stores, then it would be a fair competition in the free market. But as it is, it's not open versus closed — it's open versus cool.
- glhaynes 17y ago
  I don't think it's at all clear that Apple's product coolness is orthogonal to whether they're open or not. If we go with the instance you set out (iPhone OS is licensed or open sourced, presumably), we would lose one of the key differentiators of iPhone: the consistent hardware and software UI. Licensees would build devices with more than one (main) hardware button, differing aspect ratios, hardware keyboards, etc. iPhone OS app developers would have more devices to target and users would be left with software that isn't fully optimized for that device's strengths and form factor. You can't have the good of "open" without the bad. Not that I'm saying that there being such systems in existence is a bad thing by any means: I'm very glad that Android and the like exist. They've got strong advantages because of their openness: if you want a hardware keyboard, you ain't ever getting one from Apple, and it'd be a poorer world if nobody could get a phone with a hardware keyboard. But disadvantages from that openness are unavoidable, too. So, to me, the optimal situation for customers is for there to be a mix of providers with varying degrees of openness. This increases choice and diversity: there aren't only different makers of phones, there are different whole models of what those devices should be like, with each model competing on its strengths, not just individual devices. If nobody in the "open" camp can produce something as cool as Apple (I'm not saying this is the case), then maybe we should reconsider whether open always leads to the best solutions.
  - chc 17y ago
    I absolutely wouldn't say that open always leads to be the best solution. That's what I was (unsuccessfully) trying to say before: Openness is one desirable attribute for a system, but not the only one. Apple utterly fails at openness but succeeds spectacularly at most others, so its system is very good overall. Android is better at openness but inferior in many other respects that people care about. And I didn't really mean "open up the iPhone OS." What I meant is that we don't have a fight between an open iPhone (even a relatively open one that just didn't arbitrarily ban political cartoons and anything not written in C) and a closed iPhone, so we can't say "Look at this — the closed system is winning. Closed must be better."

chc 17y ago

That isn't what's happening, though. Apple is easily among the best of the best at making cool things — this is debatable, but it's close enough to true that I hope it won't be too controversial. The coolness of Apple's things is orthogonal to whether they're open or closed. Apple sells people on this coolness, and they don't know what they're missing that they could have in an open system. It's much like the "blub problem" — when you're using something that works for you and that's all you know, it's easy to miss ways it could be better. If people were free to sell their own iPhones with customized iPhone OSen and app stores, then it would be a fair competition in the free market. But as it is, it's not open versus closed — it's open versus cool.

glhaynes 17y ago
I don't think it's at all clear that Apple's product coolness is orthogonal to whether they're open or not. If we go with the instance you set out (iPhone OS is licensed or open sourced, presumably), we would lose one of the key differentiators of iPhone: the consistent hardware and software UI. Licensees would build devices with more than one (main) hardware button, differing aspect ratios, hardware keyboards, etc. iPhone OS app developers would have more devices to target and users would be left with software that isn't fully optimized for that device's strengths and form factor. You can't have the good of "open" without the bad. Not that I'm saying that there being such systems in existence is a bad thing by any means: I'm very glad that Android and the like exist. They've got strong advantages because of their openness: if you want a hardware keyboard, you ain't ever getting one from Apple, and it'd be a poorer world if nobody could get a phone with a hardware keyboard. But disadvantages from that openness are unavoidable, too. So, to me, the optimal situation for customers is for there to be a mix of providers with varying degrees of openness. This increases choice and diversity: there aren't only different makers of phones, there are different whole models of what those devices should be like, with each model competing on its strengths, not just individual devices. If nobody in the "open" camp can produce something as cool as Apple (I'm not saying this is the case), then maybe we should reconsider whether open always leads to the best solutions.
- chc 17y ago
  I absolutely wouldn't say that open always leads to be the best solution. That's what I was (unsuccessfully) trying to say before: Openness is one desirable attribute for a system, but not the only one. Apple utterly fails at openness but succeeds spectacularly at most others, so its system is very good overall. Android is better at openness but inferior in many other respects that people care about. And I didn't really mean "open up the iPhone OS." What I meant is that we don't have a fight between an open iPhone (even a relatively open one that just didn't arbitrarily ban political cartoons and anything not written in C) and a closed iPhone, so we can't say "Look at this — the closed system is winning. Closed must be better."