11
Jun

When ‘cool’ trumps openness and transparency

Posted by Steven Hodson in Wednesday, June 11th 2008      

Too bad if you don't like how Apple does business. I was reading a post this morning by Felix from #comment where he suggested that Apple is the new Microsoft and about halfway through my read an interesting thought occurred to me. While his points were mainly geared to actually comparing the two corporations and how they do business I found myself looking at a slightly larger picture.

Without a doubt the whole Web 2.0 movement and its various step children like social media have brought about a wave of a belief that everything is about openness and transparency. The one big target that proponents of this ethos love to trot out as an example of what they are against is Microsoft and its past history; and maybe even its current actions, of being a monopolistic soul crushing company. For this movement everything is couched in words of things like OpenID, Data Portability along with the ever present transparency and any other warm and fuzzy catch phrase they can think of.

The thing that gets me is that these people advocating (because evangelizing is no longer the cool word of the day) all this openness and transparency have decided that their primary tool – their computer – is the product of one of the most closed and anti-community companies around.

Yes I am talking about Apple.

It doesn’t matter where you turn at Web 2.0 type conferences or start-up offices all you will see is a sea of MacBook Pros or their desktop equivalents. It doesn’t matter where you turn in the blogosphere or the news aggregators all you hear is drooling praise for anything Mac or Apple. It is the cool factor that everyone on the cutting edge of the web wants to have in their hands. Anything Microsoft is looked up with derision and disdain as if we are lesser being for being sucked in by the Borg.

The thing is that for all the flack that Microsoft gets it does one thing that the Apple operating system can’t do. It can run on just about any hardware available whereas OS X can only be used on Apple hardware. Sure Microsoft should get slapped around for what it has done in the past and for trying to screw its customers but they aren’t the only company to do this. Apple in my opinion is a far more predatory company because they said you want our operating system then you must pay us what we want for our hardware. You don’t like it – tough.

I give far more kudos to the Linux community than I do either Apple or Microsoft because they practice what they preach. With Web 2.0 folks though it sure seems that being a part of the cool crowd is more important than than any real transparency or openness. To me the fact that Apple is touted as being the symbol of Web 2.0; whether it be the people creating this new space or the people writing about, is hypocritical of the movement.

Conversation Tags: , , ,



under: The Desktop, The Web    

Related Post

Viewing 4 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    Steven, I don't know how I missed this post earlier this week. I agree, to an extent, but also disagree to an extent. I started out on a Mac (well, after the TRS-80), but was an exclusive Windows user for YEARS, and an NT sysadmin. The problem with the "open" nature of Windows is that it tries to be something for everyone. The lockdown on Apple's OS to Apple's hardware means I'm not facing device conflicts or hunting for drivers. I don't Plug 'n Pray, and yes, Apple users pay a premium for that. LIke Blue overthere, I can build my own Windows machine, and have built more than I can count (and sometime I should tell you the story of my dad's old machine... a Pentium in an 8086 box). I'm at a point, however, when I need things to just WORK which is why I switched over last year, and I don't even run a VM on my laptop. I just don't have the TIME to be a Windows user anymore.
    • ^
    • v
    I can definitely see your point. I have been a developer with Microsoft technologies since 1994 and was for almost a decade a complete zealot about it. Even through the anti-trust stuff I was still a proponent... I could build my own computer to my own specs and upgrade it whenever I wanted to and for cheap; all the software I used was available on Windows (and half or more wasn't on the Mac); and Microsoft was always spectacularly supportive of their development community.

    Then came 2004 when MS failed to deliver on Longhorn (Vista) and the related tech they previewed at PDC in 2003. By 2005 I was angsty and by 2006 I was no longer enthusiastic. In early 2007 I bought a Mac and started doing development in non-Microsoft technologies. I was dangerously close to being sucked into the whole Apple/anti-MS mindset. But early this year I got back into .Net development (in a project opportunity with bleeding edge MS tech) and I'm impressed and excited again. I think MS has begun to redeem itself...

    I still have my MacBook Pro but I run Bootcamp Windows on it exclusively. It's beautiful hardware and for the total package in a laptop it was equivalent or cheaper to what I would have paid for a Windows box (at least when I bought it). I still think Apple is a good company, and even own a little bit of stock, but I am turned off by some of the same elitism you point out and I don't like Apple's practice of throwing backwards compatibility out the window when releasing new products.

    I think there's a good balance there between the two camps and I'm glad that there's that competition of memes. It gives us all a choice and spurs innovation. I can kind of have my cake and eat it too with Bootcamp, and now that I have a more objective perspective, just sit back and enjoy the drama of the competing fanboys. It's all good as long as you don't get too caught up in it yourself.
    • ^
    • v
    Steve, interesting observation. I suspect that the disconnect comes because dataportability happens off the desktop, high in the clouds. To most people they don't seem related - in fact quite the opposite, so many people mock Stallman for arguing at a much lower level for exactly the same things. The right to have the all the freedoms that gnu promises.
    • ^
    • v
    Reading this article made me think of Facebook. Both FB and Apple have a walled-garden approach. Both are kinda exclusive little clubs. Both seems to be accepted as big players in this whole Web 2.0/Social media thing.

    Great post.

Trackbacks

close Reblog this comment
Powered by Disqus · Learn more
blog comments powered by Disqus
« The art of getting a community involved
Some thoughts on a Microsoft after Gates »