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XML Co-Founder Joins Google, Blasts iPhone
XML co-founder Tim Bray has taken the job of 'Developer Advocate' at Google. Don't other companies call that position 'Evangelist?' Because he sure doesn't mince words against the iPhone in his first sermon: 'It's a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord's pleasure and fear his anger.
As much as I enjoy tinkering w/ open source and recognise its massive contribution, why is it so hard for freetards to grasp the key issue:
For normal users (or even geeks who don't have the time/energy to care), walled garden that "just works" beats open solution that "sorta works" (even 'mostly') 10 times out of 10
Apple's formula is not a secret and their products sell themselves. Should they wish to implement a walled garden that's their perogative (and in their defence it is a major factor for the smooth integration of all their components / relative lack of issues compared to other platforms and OSes.) The market has shown that people are willing to sacrifice open-ness and pure performance for buck for a superior end user experience (note its not value for buck: my time fixing stupid linux bugs is a COST).
Apple wants to control the world's premium hardware devices (and how they are used).
Google wants to control the world's information.
Only one of these visions frightens me.
-Stu
1. Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
2. Become a god and you won't need any other gods
Whenever I'm uncertain about the meaning of a word I look it up in the dictionary. You should do the same with the word monopoly becuase your definition is not the usual one.
And there you go, proving my point.
According to you, I must be an Apple fanboy, and a "dishonest prick" simply because you don't accept a point of view that I have expressed.
Therefore pretty much proving yourself not to be such a "reasonable" person as you would probably wish to be.
I agree that if you buy an iPod or an iPhone you are likely subject to lock-in. You, as a clearly well-informed person, do not want to get locked in. But you DO want the lovely shinyness, dont you? Otherwise why do you get so angry and start calling people pricks? - I think you protest too much!
You either are too young to remember, or you have a short memory.
Or I've heard the same bullshit urban legends about Microsoft repeated three dozen times, but I still don't believe them without proof.
Microsoft went out of their way to maintain compatibility with their own older software. But until recently they always tried to block competition intentionally. Although Windows 3.1 ran perfectly on DR-DOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS, it was returning an non-fatal error message, in effect convincing users there was something wrong with DR-DOS. Eventually Novell gave up on DR-DOS and sold it to Caldera (now called SCO). The ensuing lawsuit was settled out of court sometime in 2000 for $155 million, with Novell and Caldera sharing the profits. This is just one example.
I've heard that story before, and I've yet to see any proof that error was put in-place intentionally to shut-out DR-DOS. And notice how even Wikipedia (extremely biased against Microsoft, but at least beholden to provide facts when possible) says the error only occurred in a beta, and the released version did not have it.
Gee! You think it was a ... *bug*? That was later *fixed*?
When they couldn't outright deny competitors access, Microsoft's policy was embrace, extend, extinguish. Internet Explorer 4 and 5 were NOT standards compliant.
First of all, the W3C had somehow even less teeth in this era than they do now. Do you think the equivalent Netscape versions were anywhere even remotely close to the standards? No.
Here's a few reasons why IE 4-6 were not standards-compliant, and the reasons why:
1) ActiveX support. Why? Because HTML was originally designed to be extensible (that's why SCRIPT tags have a LANGUAGE property). Microsoft just extended HTML in the way the W3C said people were able to. Five years later, and suddenly that's a huge crime and everybody hates them for it.
2) CSS box model. When Microsoft implemented CSS, they read W3C's incredibly-vague specs on the box model differently than they were intended to be read and ended up with an incompatible box model. W3C didn't fix the vague standards until Microsoft had already shipped a browser.
3) DOM extensions. IE developers knew the DOM sucked-ass as much as all other right-thinking people knew/know. They added a few DOM functions/behaviors that aren't in the standards to make using it easier. (Note: adding additional DOM functions not defined in the standards is not wrong. Remember: all of this was intended to be extensible!) When W3C saw that these DOM functions were useful, they standardized some of them... in a completely different way than the already-implemented Microsoft version! Thus, the sibling function to "innerHTML" is named "textContent" instead of the much-better-named Microsoft version "innerText".
The point is today Microsoft is a better company because the competition forced them to open up and listen to their clients. Remove competitive pressure and I promise you they'll revert to their old policies.
Look, I'm not saying that Microsoft is full of angels, but they're not nearly a hundredth as evil as you seem to think they are.
Look at what you're criminalizing them for: A bug in a beta. Making use of the extensibility built-in to HTML/DOM. Trying to implement W3C's shitty vaguely-worded standards. That's it! That's not mustache-twirling evil villain stuff!
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