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No Playboy App For iPad, After All
tsamsoniw writes "The rumors that a Playboy app would appear in the Apple App Store were greatly exaggerated. Playboy plans to offer an online service through which subscribers can access past and current issues of the nudie mag — and per Playboy, it will be accessible via Safari and support iPad features (whatever that means). But if Playboy does come out with a native app for iPad, all the nudity will be censored. That should be just fine for the legions of people who indeed read the magazine for the articles. This really shouldn't be a surprise, though: If Apple insists on 'protecting' users of its high-priced gear from pixelated naughty bits in a graphic-novel version of classic literature, it certainly won't let users access the full monty. It's a shame, though: If Apple's customers want access to that sort of content, Apple should allow them to get at it via a native app instead of suffering a potentially buggier, less secure browser-based experience."
It used to be necessary for the US Government to hire people who were known as "Kremlinologists," people who had spent years studying the history and culture of the Soviet Union and observing the politics and processes within the Politburo. Their role was to assist in formulating policy related to an utterly alien and intimidating foreign power, impermeable and mysterious to the rest of the world, yet strong enough to destroy civilization on a whim. Shrub's secretary of state, Condi Rice, was an example of someone who was trained in this line of work.
Now, Kremlinologists are no longer in demand, but it seems that it's necessary for major ISVs and publishers to recruit "Applepologists," people who are skilled at reading chicken entrails, tea leaves, tarot cards, and gossip sites to forecast the company's reaction to the submission of a given app. Will the same guidelines used for music and film be applied to Game X or Magazine Y? If not, which guidelines will apply, and which will not? Which camp is likely to be in favor with Jobs and Cook at the time the product is likely to be ready for submission -- the batshit-loony puritans who rejected a dictionary for "not being family friendly," or the anonymous contingent of progressives who would have given Playboy the green light to announce their iPad app? What are the odds that the rank-and-file employees will force change from the bottom, once they realize that they aren't really in a "worker's paradise" but a prison made of increasingly-lofty rhetoric and decreasingly-lucrative stock options?
Of course, we all know how successful Rice and the other Kremlinologists were at predicting the fall of the Soviet Union and understanding what would come next. Can anyone guess what will happen when Jobs finally leaves for good?
It's obvious there are two cultures within Apple, one dominated by intellectuals and geeks and the other dominated by Mormons or something. Which one will gain the upper hand?