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The Apple Paradox, Closed Culture & Free-Thinking Fans
waderoush writes "The secrecy surrounding the expected Apple tablet computer is only the latest example of the company's famously closed and controlling culture. Yet millions of designers, musicians, and other creative professionals love their Apple products, and the Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity. How can a company whose philosophy of information sharing is so at odds with that of most of its customers be so successful? This Xconomy essay explores three possible explanations. 1) Closed innovation, overseen by a guiding genius like Steve Jobs, may be the only way to build such coherent, compelling products. 2) Apple's hardware turns out to be more 'open' than the company intended — Jobs originally wanted to keep third-party apps off the iPhone, for example. 3) Related to #1: customers are pragmatic about quality, and the open source and free software movements haven't produced anything remotely as useful as Mac OS X and the iPhone."
Apple's products are well designed and work. That, apparently, is the key to their popularity.
On contrast, Microsoft's offerings were crappy — and that fact, rather than their being "closed" or anti-competitive, is why we hated them and the company.
BTW, nowadays Windows seems to suck much less and so newer generations have much hostility towards Microsoft — despite their remaining just as closed and anti-competitive as they were before.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I guess FreeBSD was useful, for the 4 guys who installed it. Now it's the basis for an OS used by tens of millions - that's useful.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
I have no idea what Windows apps you are using where drag and drop does not work. I have never run into a Windows application where drag and drop does not work. I have used multiple different gui's for *nix systems and also have not run into any drag and drop issues.
Pick ten applications from companies that aren't Discreet-,Microsoft-, Adobe-, IBM- or OtherHugeCorporation-sized and see how may handle drag and drop everywhere where a user might conceivably consider dropping stuff (and no, dropping the wrong thing on it should not result in "UNHANDLED EXCEPTION DIE COCKSUCKING BASTARD LUSER!!").
Also, I was under the assumption, correct me if I am wrong, that OSX now works with Intel based chips, which would mean that if we are looking at it strictly from a OS standpoint, Apple has no control over hardware. Since you went into issues that Windows has, I am going to assume you went on a basis of OS only and not a full hardware and software standpoint.
So when you buy a random PC whitebox from an OEM it's not just "random pile of hardware that doesn't explode when powered on" + "Windows" + "drivers with the OEM's logo tacked on to the installer on the rescue disk"? Because with Apple products they pick a small set of hardware and make sure it actually works with the hardware, "actually works" meaning that you won't run into silly stuff like the NIC working because the driver is completely broken (happened to me on an OEM Windows box a few months ago) or that the graphics card drivers are "OEM only" and the OEM forgets to include them (running on generic VGA driver) and insists on you downloading the drivers from some FTP server in Taiwan that is unreachable 90% of the time and gives you
I am also curious as to what this "Apple way" is when it comes to software "Just Working". Getting an internet connection working again on a Mac is always fun.
Yes, you pick the interface you want to configure, set up IPv4 (and IPv6 if you're using it) and then you're up and running. What exactly were you trying to do, spend six hours desperately trying to find the "Start" menu so you could click on "Control panel" as you did on your Windows box?
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
This you say is interesting. KDE4 is often demonized as looking too much like Vista or 7, but KDE had its appearance before V/7 did...Unfortunately most people will never know, and prefer to just bash "that windows clone".
It's like QT, it's perfectly usable for hardcore license hippies now, but it still has that fame of "not free (as speech)" you get in Gnome vs KDE discussions.