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Have Walled Gardens Killed the Personal Computer?
theodp writes "Harvard Law School Prof Jonathan Zittrain explains in The Personal Computer is Dead why you should be afraid — very afraid — of the snowballing replicability of the App Store Model. 'If we allow ourselves to be lulled into satisfaction with walled gardens,' warns Zittrain, 'we'll miss out on innovations to which the gardeners object, and we'll set ourselves up for censorship of code and content that was previously impossible. We need some angry nerds.' Searchblog's John Battelle, who's also solidly in the tear-down-this-walled-garden camp, adds: 'I'm not a nerd, quite, but I'm sure angry.'"
No way, Angry Nerds will not be in the App Store!
I haven't RTFA, but the instant question is: So what?
As long as a device solves a problem to the user, that's what the device should restrain itself to do.. General use PCs have proven to become virus/worms/problem infested in the hands of "normal" users..
There will always be general use pc's for those who are willing and have to skills to handle them responsibly..
I for one welcome this new era when tech support nightmares get reduced to a minimum..
This is why we have free software and open source software.
So that we're not bound by the whims of some business model.
You're still free to use any other framework or do your own. Hell, if we make that argument then Linux would be walled garden too. But in both cases you are still free to do what you want, if you want. In true walled garden (like iOS) you are not.
With Apple, you get a walled garden where Apple controls what apps are allowed. The apps are high quality but developer control is lost. With Android, it's the "wild wild west" where anything you want to create can get sold. And it shows. I see the new apps each day for Android and most of it is pure trash. Honestly, how many bikini apps need to get released each day? The upshot here is that anyone can create anything and sell it for Android. There is always a tradeoff.
I prefer repositories. You can't really be walled in, because you can just add some other repo in and have all those packages too. It's not like it's so hard to navigate either, it's just that most package manager frontends remain very technical, maybe excepting the ubuntu software centre(?).
I'm developing an innovative synthesis program for the iPad. I wouldn't be doing this without the walled garden. I'm happy with the distributions system, the quality control rules, and the closed development environment. If the system cuts down on piracy a bit, that's also a plus.
Walls can easily be broken. The jailbreaking community is alive and well. So as far as I'm concerned, it's the best of both worlds and the op ed is a lot of FUD.
It always finds a way.
There's Secure Boot for that.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Simple solution: don't buy Apple.
(I honestly don't even know if I'm trolling with this statement or not anymore)
I think Apple is going to remove root access from the Mac in one or two more OS X updates, and you'll only be able to retain your root access by paying the small annual developer fee. It makes sense to cement their revenue stream from a platform that's still gaining users; the only question is when they can afford to throw the gauntlet down to Microsoft & Adobe.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
They can't license their work as Free Software, because those license terms conflict with Apple's.
such ecosystems can legally and single handedly kill free software.
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The PC is not dead its just that common end users are driving up the shut-up-and-take-my-money model. the PC will end up being left to the geeks again which is probably the same small percentage of people (compared to the entire pc market space right now) it was back in the late 80s. the only reason common end users bought pcs was to get on the internet. they have other ways to do that now without having to learn anything. internet access has acheived the easiness of the VCR and thats what most people want who are not geeks.
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Market power can be just as limiting as government power. If nobody's making anything else because the walled gardeners have sewn up the market, what are you going to do?
Have walled gardens killed everyone's ability to come up with new metaphors for closed systems?
- "open gardens" have caused far more trouble then the enemies of walled gardens care to admit. And i'm not talking about trojans, virii, rootkits or whatever. Just the HUGE mess they allowed to be made in terms of API and backwards compatibility. Fuck that shit. If walled gardens can keep things "just working", well there is a BIG pro argument you're ignoring.
- web apps are still around. I don't think apple will kill mobile safari any time soon. So there. Here's your open garden you can play in and make a big fucking mess off. Now leave the people who want to GetThingsDone alone please with your whining. Go play and shut up.
- hack your fucking phone if you really want to break things and bother tons of people with software that relies on dependencies that are no longer supported. But then don't start complaining how apple broke your app.
- DONT BUY IT. If you're having such a monumental issue with walled gardens, stop buying stuff from them. But oohhhh shiny steam app... must buy... and all those achievements... ohhh... must have... and those hats... groovy... and the whole fucking world needs to see my status update. But facebook sucks ! That's right. It sucks and still you want to have it. For free.
goddamd kids...
It's not the Walled Gardens per se, it's the fact that apps for iPad typically cost anything from $1 to $5. Just contrast that w/ what a PC software title costs, and you have your answer. Sure, it's convenient to just get things from the app store and have them automatically install in seconds, but even aside from the ease of use is the fact that most applications & games, when not free, typically cost less than a visit to Burger King or Wendys. If they were priced like $30, $100, $200, etc, people would balk @ buying them, no matter how easy they are to download & install.
While PCs should by no means adapt tablet UXs, even though Metro, Gnome3 & Unity may be forced on users, they could certainly use a Walled Garden approach of clicking an App Store (or a Windows or Android equivalent), picking the titles they want, pay peanuts for it, and get it downloaded on their systems. In fact, it would be even better for Linux PCs than Windows. And if an app is huge that it's not feasable to download it like that, it should be an orderable option along w/ a PC - things like Office, Quicken and so on. Do that, and laptops may after all hold their own against tablets.
It took a long time for some of those to fall. It takes a long time before things get bad enough to affect the 'average' user, and the walls are much shinier these days.
Think about the phrase "personal computer."
How many people do you know who really need a completely general-purpose computer that they own and control personally?
How many "PCs" are actually nodes in a centrally controlled system, and not "personal" at all?
Because of the economics of making "PCs," we have the illusion that hundreds of millions of people buy and use "personal computers" each year. In reality, a minority, possibly a small minority, of those people actually take advantage of anything those "PCs" do that would require personal control over a general-purpose computer.
This is the reason mobile devices that are not quite "personal computers" are rightly popular. They serve the actual need. Hopefully, it will be possible to use mobile devices as if they were personal computers, so that the potential of personal computers can be applied to a networked, mobile world.
I wrote parts of this stuff
They want to make it's like the phone company where you have to rent or pay fees to use stuff that you own.
SGI? You're blaming the people who took their closed 3D programming language, and made it public and available to all as OpenGL, for being a walled garden??
Nobody's killing 'Open Computing' - just there are now some very nice walled gardens, if you prefer it this way.
Provides a nice, safe, stable starting point for a lot of people who were previously scared shitless of technology (if the iphone didn't exist, do you think they'd all be using Android?). If they're happy, they stay there, if they eventually find it limiting, they can move on.
As the recent recipient of "Microsoft called me, asked me to load teamviewer, I left them on my laptop for 2 hours, uninstalled AVG for them as it was 'conflicting' and oh paypalled them £75" call from an elderly late-joiner to the world of IT - I think some people should be locked into walled gardens for their own good.
All of this will happen again.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, online services were walled gardens. There were of course minor exceptions - BBSes who all exchanged information with each other via FidoNet. But the big names were CompuServe, GEnie, MSN, and (what would eventually become the 900 lb gorilla) America Online. They had their day, until the Internet tore down those walls. Today, all those services are pretty much gone. MSN is no longer a subscription service. AOL is still hanging on, mostly due to monthly service revenue from old people who don't know that they can get their Internet without having to pay AOL.
I think what happens is that when a new type of service/product is created, the initial creators and early copycats end up with most of the market share. Then they try setting up walls to protect their gardens and preserve their market share. Eventually an open alternative comes along which works better and/or is as easy to use, and the walls fall. Arguably, something similar happened in the 1970s/1980s with computer operating systems. Each computer maker had their own OS with its own ecosphere and apps. Eventually, MS-DOS ended up winning the market not because it was the best, but because it (and the PC platform it ran on) was open.
I suppose it's possible that, eventually, some company could "get it right" and preserve their walled garden in perpetuity. I'd argue Facebook is much closer to this than Apple.* But based on history, the safe bet is against any company managing to pull this off. Eventually something bigger and better comes along which consigns the original giant to a niche, if not irrelevance. *(Google is open enough that they allow you to extract the data stored in their services - their walls rather porous.)
The one market where I haven't seen this happening is gaming consoles. But I think that's because the nature of game compatibility/hardware and the refresh cycle forces the entire industry to "reboot" every few years. First it was Atari, then Nintendo, then Sony, and currently it's split between Nintendo (Wii) and Microsoft (Xbox). The amount of time between these reboots is short enough that an open platform can't develop. But the reboots also mean that each company has to start over from scratch every few years to maintain dominance.
As long as there is a need for performance computing, tinkering, people who build their own systems, and old-school hacking, there will be the PC. The PC has survived everything thrown at it so far and will survive well into the future. The article seems to mostly be whining about Apple turning OS X into another iDevice. If Apple is the problem, don't use Apple's products. Use a Windows machine or a Linux box. I hear tell that BSD is still alive and kicking. Solaris still has a community as well. There are other less used platforms that be switched to as well.
The problem is not that the PC is dying, the problem is that it is becoming a niche. Most people just want to check Facebook, email, and play some crappy games. They are not writing papers, presentation, or programs. They do not use SPICE, MATLAB, MAPLE, GCC, or any other in the other long list of programs and tools that many of us take for granted. A smart phone or a tablet is good enough.
For those of us who do have to do any type of creative work, the PC will still be needed. Even if Microsoft decided to take the route of Apple's locked down operating systems, there are and will be alternatives. There are dozens of hackers who do nothing but try to port Linux and BSD to other platforms just because they can. There are also people who love jail-braking these devices for the same reason. It might evolve to smaller form factors in the future but the PC will be around for a long time. As long as there is a need for power computing, PC's will live.
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Not really. I don't need to jailbreak my PC to run software created with a different framework, nor do I have trouble running different apps created with different frameworks at the same time.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
The author makes his article sound like it is about innovation, but all his examples of "innovation" that have been excluded from the garden are related to Free Speech (like bashing homosexuals). There is nothing innovative about that, it's been around for a couple thousand years.
To use a car analogy, most people would prefer a car which they got in and travelled from A to B, without having to know anything about oil levels, brake pads, shock absorbers or what a cam shaft is for. Petrolheads would say "But you can have so much fun by tinkering with the engine!", to which the majority of car drivers would reply "But I don't care about any of that, I just want to get to my destination. Give me a zero-maintenance car please."
No, to use a car analogy, they don't want to have to deal with things like learning traffic rules and regulations or having to use signals or a brake.
And they don't want to go from A to B, they want to go from A to "I don't care, but entertain me!".
They want a car with a chauffeur and all their friends in it, and where they don't decide the next stop. I.e. a tour bus.
It's not about what I am free to do as an individual. It's about the herd mentality reducing innovation. But if you want to talk about individuality,ironically that is one of the double edged swords that cuts Linux all too often. Too much of either is a bad thing. I just think that the tendency towards frameworks has reached the apex of the pendulum.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
The argument that "you can always use Y if you're not satisfied with X" is a fallacy in the world of computers. The laws of market, especially in a market with high initial and near zero variable cost, contradict it. Allow me to elaborate.
The main reason why hardware has become (comparably) cheap in the last few years is the fact that the development cost, which are pretty much the whole cost of any kind of hardware (let's be blunt here, it ain't the epoxy for the board and the silicon for the chip), could be spread out over more units. Do you think CPUs could be sold at less than ten times the price if the market for computers was as big as it was three decades ago? It's even better visible in software, it's by no means ten or hundred times as much of an investment to produce specialized business software compared to some games, the market is just considerably smaller.
Saying now that if I'm not happy with X I could always use Y doesn't work out for exactly this reason. If everyone else switches over to X, forcing the maker of Y to either fold or increase the price for Y, I will be forced to use it as well or not use anything altogether. I will not have the option to continue using Y. Because I alone do not allow the development of Y to continue.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And precisely how does that explain FreeBSD, Haiku OS or any number of other OSes that are tiny in terms of the desktop market, yet still attract enough following to be viable?
A lot of these projects are driven by precisely what you say is a fallacy. A lot of them are driven because a few developers dislike the status quo or for whom the status quo doesn't work. Firefox is probably the best example of that.
Do you really think Firefox would be the same today (for better or worse), if it had never topped a 2% market share?
What Opportunist said DOES precisely explain FreeBSD and others. If you want to make the extraordinary assertion that people who aren't using FreeBSD deliberately choose to develop apps for it instead of some other OS that they do use, go ahead. What seems to actually happen out here in the real world, is that fewer app developers are attracted to support smaller OSes and the original OS developers pick up some of the slack by also developing the core of fundamental apps, or porting apps to the OS themselves so the developers don't have to. Then there's the Debian solution, slower, stabler development so there's more time for other people to come and play in your sandbox.
Who is John Cabal?
Can't one just install Metro apps by installing Visual Studio? Or will Microsoft be doing the same $99 per year to run your own compiled programs on your own hardware garbage that it already does on XBLIG and Windows Phone 7 and that Apple copied for the iOS App Store?
And can't one just use desktop applications that fake a Metro interface instead?
Sure, if you have written all of it yourself. Most free software projects have more then one contributer. It is somewhere between a hassle and impossible to find all of them and get them to agree on a license change.
I think an important thing people are overlooking is that not having walled gardens allows curious people to learn a few things. I for one knew just about nothing about technology when I had my first computer back in around 2000 (yes I'm young), but it was very interesting poking around the Math Blaster directory editing files in paint and being like O: this actually changed how things look in the game! Such things are hardly even possible (for people who don't know about extraction methods) in big games even on Windows since they compress everything into a few large binaries, and I'm sure having everything "just work" would dampen a lot of learning. Sure it's nice that things just work but things already seem to be dumbing children down enough with TV and schools as it is...
Pretty disturbing that "freedom" from corporate control could be relegated to obscurity. After all, what's the fucking point of Free Software if none of your users can actually take advantage of it even if they wanted to?
The Firefox add-on system has been infected with this problem. It used to be that you could write add-ons for Firefox, put them on a web site, and let users download them. Now, Firefox has what's essentially an "app store". Add-ons have to go through an approval process which takes about two months. Then they have to be hosted on Mozilla's site. Mozilla tracks how many users are using each add-on through a back channel in the browser. Because of the new policy of very frequent updates to Firefox, add-ons have to be updated regularly, and for add-ons on the Mozilla site, this happens automatically and remotely. So your add-on is now tied to Mozilla's "cloud".
Firefox itself is slaved to Mozilla's "cloud" now. It's become much more demanding about insisting that it be updated when Mozilla issues a new version.
It's still possible to host add-ons on your own site, but warning messages appear if they're loaded, and they rapidly become obsolete and break as Firefox changes. It's still possible to turn off updates of Firefox, but by default, you get nagged. The jaws are slowly closing on Firefox users.
This is what passes for "open source" today.
..that I lived in the golden age of computer freedom, and future generations will only read about it in history books.
Walled gardens, virtual machines, signed code, app stores etc may be useful, but little by little, are removing our freedom to actually control the machine.
I fear that in the future, you will need a license to write code under constant government scrutiny. Kinda like making explosives.
But then, maybe I'm just a curmudgeon...
We already have angry nerds. Angry nerds either (a) don't develop in walled gardens or (b) do it as a paid job and complain about it. Notice, a lot of software developers aren't nerds, let alone angry ones. So, even if angry nerds were to stop working in walled gardens, it wouldn't magically solve anything. No, generally, the best way to end a walled garden is for people to stop paying for a walled garden. Now, even an angry consumer won't necessarily do the job. Look at how many consumers were/are angry with Windows in the 90s and how well funded Microsoft was. But, that's at least closer to the mark[et].
Talking to the choir about not "sinning" really misses the mark. You have to speak from the pulpit about the congregation to the congregation and make them realize they should be angry and why they have to make the tough choices. Yes, this will end up pissing off the congregation and many will not listen. But, making out nerds to be the bogey men who are the cause of the problem or magical saviors who can fix the problem they did not cause does very little to fix anything. I mean, we already have Richard Stallman, the FSF, and the GPL, and we still have walled gardens.
Clearly it's the choices of the populace at large that is the issue. Having said that, I think it should be recognized that a significant subset of the population may choose to live in a walled garden and that doesn't mean the end of the freedom that most will and do enjoy on the PC. That's just Armageddon speak that's yet to be realized. Sure, people need to speak up and tell the populace that Armageddon could occur if they don't do something. But, it's one thing to warn of a possible future and condemn those who choose a present for themselves that only effects themselves--well, to the degree anything one chooses for oneself only effects oneself.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
I can't believe i have to spell this out and why so many bloggers think the sky is falling i have NO clue, except maybe just whoring for page views.The iShiny is a niche folks. sure it makes apple a metric fuckton of cash and makes too many developers drool at the thought of iMoney because Apple users will happily shell out real money for things Windows and Linux users wouldn't give a cent for, but its still a niche.
As someone in retail I can tell you there are TWO reasons why the iShiny is growing like crazy while the PC is so much lower and NEITHER have to do with the death or birth of anything. 1.- The iShiny simply hasn't existed very long so those that want one may not have gotten one yet. Look at how PC sales went nuts when they first became affordable, hell stores were going through units as fast as they could get them in the store.
And the most important reason 2.- The PC is mature technology and for the vast majority of the masses has been "good enough" for several years now. Even a 5 year old laptop or desktop is frankly INSANELY overpowered for what the vast majority do with a personal computer and everybody and their dog and their dog's squeaky toy has one if not several. In just my own family we have a single core laptop, dual core laptop, a dual core netbook, and no less than FIVE desktops ranging from a 3GHz Celeron for my mom all the way up to my quad. With all the units going through the shop I could frankly add another desktop or 3 without even blinking but what the fuck would i do with them? hell I'm typing this on a 1.8GHz Sempron I keep as a nettop and downloader box. This thing is circa 2003 but you know what? for the web and downloading it is quite peppy, even plays SD flash without a complaint.
So let these guys get their panties in a wad, it isn't like Windows PCs and Linux servers are going anywhere. Ballmer will put out his abomination called Windows 8 Dumbass Edition and finally get a big fat pink slip for Xmas next year, Apple could frankly put a brick in a box and still get lines around the street thanks to branding, but what is to be afraid of? The iPad? While I've met a few people that have actually forced themselves to use it constantly just to justify the money they spent the rest I've seen basically treat it as a really expensive portable video player, Mobile Phones? They are disposable razors. Folks get a new one with contract and shitcan the previous one, everyone i know has drawers full of the things. Sure they'll spend a dollar on a fart app or some shit but other than Angry Birds there hasn't been anything worth talking about.
But I hate to break the news to this guy but at the end of the day, when it comes to actually wanting to get something done? Everyone plops down in front of their desktop or laptop and breaks out an assload of software. Everybody and their cat has frankly mountains of the stuff, from some stupid app that came with their camera they really love to Quickbooks/Quicken to a bazillion other free and pay things they have collected over the years like so much belly button lint. What are they gonna do, give everyone a free copy of every app they own? try to force them all to go buy it all over again? yeah they tried that shit with the lousy backwards compatibility of Vista and I spent a year and a half wiping the damned thing off computers for XP.
TL:DR? Appstores are a niche market for a niche product, that is all. Sure they make good money but that is ONLY because they are a NEW market and once the shiny wears off and those that want one have one the bottom will crash and crash HARD. Don't forget there was a time not too long ago when much of the same things being said about the iShiny was said about the Palm Pilot, like how it would replace everything and rule the world. Where is it now?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I agree with the previous poster. A framework in nothing but a tool. You are free to use any framework you want, or build your own. If you want a web framework for Ruby, for example, you can use Rails, or Merb, or Sinatra, or any of a number of others... or make your own.
I think the whole point of the thread is that things like app stores are the opposite. They filter what choices you get, based on arbitrary criteria set by the store owner. This will, almost by definition, inhibit innovation in some areas.
So, frankly, I think your mention of frameworks is pretty much off-topic.
Apple's App Store is a logical result of the chaos that's been exhibited on general purpose computing platforms for the last 20 years.
When end users experience crashes, blue screens, data corruptions, poor user interfaces, hung devices, and insufficient functionality, they are not "feeling their freedom". They are feeling the results of you exercising yours. And when their "local nerd" is asking them questions which leadingly suggest that they shouldn't have been doing what they've been doing, they feel angry.
End users want computing like they want toast. Put in their bread/data, push a button, and get their toast/video. The fact that this is very hard, and in some cases virtually impossible, does nothing to limit the end users' expectations. For years they have been told these computers will make their lives better and enable them in so many ways -- which they have, but they sure don't like the hidden costs that these ecosystems have dumped on them.
You know all those arguments that have been made? If you don't like it, you don't have to use it! That's all the end user is doing.
Sturgeon's Law explains that 90% of anything is crap. If curation -- in the form of App Stores or whatever -- can change those odds, even just a little bit, end users are going to move towards them in droves.
Software engineers have squandered their freedom, and end users are increasingly acting like they don't want to have any part of it any more.
(I wrote up a much longer article on the same theme.)
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
That's idealistic. If you don't use the same framework as everyone else, you'll be working alone. There aren't that many paying gigs that work that way. And all the people at different companies will use the same frameworks because they want to use transferable skills. How many main web frameworks are there being used in business? Maybe a couple, what, drupal, joomla? But there are many web frameworks. Try and go to a programming shop and tell them you want to use some obscure framework. Neither the programmers nor the company will agree, both for skill transferability reasons. One to go somewhere else, the other to be easily able to replace them. So just like the app store people gravitate to frameworks for monetary gain. In both cases the model only supports a very small number of top dogs, helping to stifle creativity and novel solutions (and don't get me wrong, in both case this makes good business sense both for the individual and the company ... but neither help develop new or innovative ideas) . The only time this doesn't work this way is with companies that locate in the middle of nowhere so they can be the biggest fish in the sea. No-one will quit because they are the only company in town, and people can't move away because the company has you use a framework that no-one else uses so your skills aren't transferable.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
"That's idealistic. If you don't use the same framework as everyone else, you'll be working alone."
Not necessarily. Tell that to David Heinemeier Hansson. He wrote his own, and now it is used regularly by hundreds of thousands.
The point is that anybody CAN write a framework, if not necessarily a commercially successful one. But there is only room for one or a few successful proprietary app stores.
"How many main web frameworks are there being used in business? Maybe a couple, what, drupal, joomla?"
Uh... here are just some, in approximate order of popularity: Zend, CodeIgniter, Rails, Django, Symfony, Cyclone3, CakePHP, Yii, Spring, Google Web Toolkit, Struts, Flex, ASP.NET MVC, Seam, Cocoon, Flask, Wicket, Zope, Grails, Express, Tornado, Tapestry, Cappuccino, Horde, JSF, Play, Seagull, Sinatra, web.py, Lift, SproutCore, Cairngorm, Apache Click, Prado, Grok, SilverStripe Sapphire, ASP.NET, Catalyst, (fab), Vaadin, Kohana, Pylons, Camping, Compojure, Hemlock, web2py, WebGUI, CherryPy, ErlyWeb, Merb, RestfulX, Erlang Web.
This is not a comprehensive list; there are quite a few more in common use.
"Try and go to a programming shop and tell them you want to use some obscure framework."
That's what I do for a living.
"In both cases the model only supports a very small number of top dogs..."
Um... no.
"The only time this doesn't work this way is with companies that locate in the middle of nowhere so they can be the biggest fish in the sea."
I disagree completely. Your premise is demonstrably wrong from the start.
Your envy clouds your judgement. It's not a walled garden and the PC is dead. It's that the driver of PC growth today is the Mac with OS X whose child, iOS is owning the next generation of personal consumption. Building the cheapest disposable PC and/or Workstation only favors Microsoft whose OEM license is paid whether HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc., sell $1000, $2000, $3,000, $4K+ systems.
No one but Apple controls the entire end-to-end solution. Not Microsoft, not anyone else. OS X sales continues to steadily expand and iOS steadily expands times ten. When Microsoft starts to dip down to 80% of the Desktop market it'll be due to Apple's OS X and it's child, iOS. It won't be due to FreeBSD, Linux, or any other UNIX flavored OS using cheap clone hardware.
You want a third big box OS for consumers to desire you'll have to control the end-to-end solution, not just the Server Market.
Nothing is guaranteed and desire to evolve into new paradigms is up to any start-up or large conglomerate to seize. If not, they'll become the next IBM who is completely out of the Consumer space.
While my choice of Linux distros (Debian) prioritises freedom, and as a result tends to be non-commercial, there are Linux repositories with paid software in them. Try an Ubuntu live CD if you'd like to preview the experience.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Frameworks only harm portability of both users and applications.
They don't prevent applications from being created or presented to the end user just because some platform tyrant decide he doesn't like them. Conflating frameworks with walled garden app stores is dishonest to the point of absurdity.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
this term in their tos :
They can't license their work as Free Software, because those license terms conflict with Apple's.
such ecosystems can legally and single handedly kill free software.
It can if iOS takes over the world. However, that doesn't appear to be happening. Android has already surpassed iOS as a phone OS, and we're finally getting some decent tablets, too. The current situation with iOS's near dominance is an aberration; just as was the case throughout the PC era, the winning platform will be the one which allows for competition among hardware vendors, and that's not an approach that fits Apple's business model.
My prediction is that Android's dominance will continue to grow and that iOS will be relegated to a highly-profitable niche, where Apple has historically lived. The bigger risk is Microsoft. If they move to a single platform across PCs and mobiles, then they might be in a position to leverage their PC platform dominance to challenge Android for the top mobile spot. Then if they go to a walled garden with anti-F/LOSS TOS, we could be in trouble. At this point, though, I'm skeptical that Microsoft will get a strong platform deployed fast enough to have any hope of ousting Android. Frankly, I think they're already too late. But they might manage to get a solid minority piece of the market, perhaps as large as Apple's.
I think a three-way battle on the software platform, plus a many-way battle on the hardware platform, will ultimately be very good for consumers. The three major players will all represent diverse approaches, too: Apple, controlled hardware & walled garden; Microsoft, open hardware & (maybe) walled garden; Google, open hardware & open software. By "open" in the previous sentence, I mean in the sense of a free market, not in the F/LOSS sense -- though a free market in software implies that F/LOSS software will be free to compete as well, and it does that pretty effectively. And, of course, Android itself is Free Software.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Stop moving the goalposts. First you say that business only supports a couple of frameworks. I show you that you are incorrect, and you say, "Well, only 38..."
I call BS. Your original point was just plain wrong.
You're high. When Microsoft starts to dip down to 80% of the Desktop it'll be due to Google/Android. Same goes for the mobile space. Cheap hardware, and 90% of your needs satisfied. Take a look at Firefox. They're not losing market share to Microsoft. And they're certainly not losing it to Safari.
It's the hardware that's becoming ubiquitous, and Apple is at its heart a hardware company. That makes it a dinosaur. Everything is moving to the cloud, whether you hate the buzzword or not. It's just too much of a pain to have to transfer your entire life over every time you get a new "iShiny" to quote the GP. And in the cloud there are two players: Google and Amazon.
... Apple controls the entire end-to-end solution.
And that is precisely why I will not be buying an iAppliance, that and the lack of standardized IO ports. The iPad (or any other slate), iPhone (or any other smartphone) is a device to display media. Apple's is just a bit more restricted, and hipper, and prettier.
The period of the multimedia PC purchased as a media display device may be over, but not the PC as a workstation.
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler
The real word example for me is that I would like to get a portable or shelf stereo that I can plug my phone into. Either using a standard microphone style jack, USB, or even SD card. Unfortunately every electronics store in the three towns around me have shelves full of stereos that only have iPhone cradles and no other option.
Yes if I order online I have a few more options, but even then it is very hard to find a portable stereo that takes audio in via a USB port.
Mono-cultures just plain suck.
OS X is just another Mac OS, It's market share is static, the only people who buy it are the same people who always bought it ...it's just a few iPhone, iPad users are now aware that Apple also do "PC"'s
MS Win Market is static as well for much the same reasons, everyone who wants one already has one...
When people can run their design applications correctly and easily on another platform OSX will die ...
When people can run their business applications on another platform Windows will die ...
iPad is a toy because it has no killer app ... iPhone has killer apps, but they are all generic (Twitter, Facebook Various other Web based apps), Siri is a gimmick they are trying to make a killer app, but it is just another shiny toy ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis