Slashdot Mirror
Lost In the Cloud
Colonel Korn writes "Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain suggests in an Op-Ed piece that the seemingly inevitable move toward the often locked-down cloud is stifling innovation and threatening our privacy: '... many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple. If the market settles into a handful of gated cloud communities whose proprietors control the availability of new code, the time may come to ensure that their platforms do not discriminate. Such a demand could take many forms, from an outright regulatory requirement to a more subtle set of incentives — tax breaks or liability relief — that nudge companies to maintain the kind of openness that earlier allowed them a level playing field on which they could lure users from competing, mighty incumbents. We've only just begun to measure this problem, even as we fly directly into the cloud. That's not a reason to turn around. But we must make sure the cloud does not hinder the creation of revolutionary software that, like the Web itself, can seem esoteric at first but utterly necessary later.'"
How can you claim that the 50k+ applications show the strength of App store when there's no credible alternative at present?
Yeah totally. Having 65,000+ apps written for your mobile platform (having just looked at some more recent numbers) and having had over 1.5 billion downloads from your store is clearly the sign of being an abject failure. Apple should just discontinue the whole iPhone line considering such abysmal numbers. If these numbers don't show any sort of strength of their store, please enlighten me to an app store for any other mobile platform that can boast such numbers. The Android Market has only about 3,000 apps and by the looks of it the ratio of crap to good is actually worse than Apple's store so that's out.
Let me guess, next you are going to tell me that the one million sales of the 3GS in a single weekend isn't a sign of strength either.