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."

Comments

Re:I'm off-duty

[lena_10326]

Actually, there is some correlation between creativity and homosexuality; you'll find a larger percentage of gays in art school than studying any other discipline

I took some art courses working on an undergrad Fine Arts program at 2 different colleges and I didn't see an unusually high number of gay students. I honestly don't know what you're talking about. I suspect you're peddling bullshit stereotypes you picked up from watching some lousy TV sitcoms.

Re:Incorrect premise

[beelsebob]

I have some better reasons than that to prefer a MacBook:

1. Sturdier – since a) apple introduced their unibody aluminium cases and b) lenovo started making IBM's designs into utter crud
2. An excellent track pad, not a track nipple
3. Really good quality IPS screens
4. MagSafe power connectors
5. A really good quality keyboard - with backlighting

Just being prettier is pretty secondary to all of those.