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 guess Apple did all that themselves...

[Mark19960]

Hi fanboy,
Since you may not know....
Do you start to build houses on the ground or do you lay a foundation first?
Say, a kernel?
So... Apple does what everyone else does, they take what is out there and nobody faults them for that.
That happens to be open source software.
They do a few tweaks, add some gawky brushed metal to it and you guys gobble it up as some innovation.
Now, do you think that Apple could just build their OS without having a complete, functional kernel with drivers?
Of that I have no doubt but they opted to take a free, open source kernel and use it.
They did not do that.... and denying the fact that the kernel and other tools that make up that operation system are all BSD at the core is just the response I expected from an uneducated fanboy.

I just to cheer for Apple over Microsoft, the problem is now the tables have turned, who do you think I would rather cheer for?