You're joking right? Half of those apps require flash or java, neither of which exist on the iPhone. The HTML5 ones are little more than toys, or simply don't work at all on an iPhone.
Apple gave devs the web app route before being forced into providing an SDK because Apple wanted to be the only entity that could provide full-featured apps. They continue to encourage the use of HTML5 so that users can see a clear distinction between quality iPhone native apps, written using Apple's SDK and making use of all of the platform's unique capabilities on the one hand, and generic, cross-platform, HTML5 toy crap on the other.
Which sort of app do you think the Apple faithful will choose? That's what I thought.
As another geezer who was actually there in the 80s I have to second your view. Apple lost the PC wars not because they made it hard for developers. They lost the PC wars because they were first out of the gate with a GUI system and took that opportunity to charge a price premium for their hardware. When the IBM PC platform became open - not by IBM's design, but by clean-room reverse engineering - there were now 50 manufacturers competing in that space which drove the price of an IBM-PC compatible to levels far below Apple's mac offerings.
Apple's developer tools and third party developer tools (Symantec and Metrowerks) were always adequate or quite good, as was their documentation. Apple's problem was with consumers and businesses, who wanted a low initial cost (and TCO be damned), not with developers.
But since Apple gets to determine which browsers exist on the iPhone and iPad, who's to say the next version of Apple's WebKit framework won't disable HTML5 ads (for example, by blocking content from known ad servers)?
After all, users won't care - they'll see it as a plus. And content providers will be forced to use iAd for all ads targeted at Safari-iPhone or Safari-iPad.
Most of Cocoa is proprietary. As a developer you get access to the headers, but not the source code of most of the Cocoa frameworks. Apple owns them and can change both interface and implementation at will, and frequently does - though they try to keep the interfaces (i.e., the headers) stable.
Owning the code, keeping it from view, and changing it at will - meets my definition of proprietary.
Maybe you were thinking of the open source clone GNUStep? Apple's platforms don't use GNUStep.
Might want to rtfa here. Under California law, journalists are treated differently with regard to search warrants under certain circumstances. Whether or not those circumstances hold here is open to question.
The journalists here will argue that they were protecting the identity of a source and that the warrant executed was therefore illegal under California law. It'll probably be up to a California appellate court to decide.
Sorry, gonna burn some karma here because I just can't stand seeing the english language murdered like this:
It makes me feel little-to-know sympathy for Gizmodo.
This should be "little to no symphathy" of course. Originally, from "little to none" describing a range, from little of something to none of it. Example:
Q: "How much stock do you put in his story?" A: "Little to none".
When used as a modifier, it becomes "little to no". Example: "I have little to no faith in his story."
It's historically accurate if that's your question.
The author Bruce Tognazzini more commonly known as TOG, literally wrote the book on user interface design. He's arguably the greatest living expert on human-computer interaction and design.
He knows how Steve Jobs manages because he worked very closely with Jobs before, during, and after the development of the original Macintosh.
In the Art of War, Sun Tzu says: " When a general [is] unable to estimate the enemy’s strength... the result must be rout."
This is the merely the beginning to understanding Job's secrecy. Naive competitors think that once the product is released they now know what the enemy's strength is, what Apple's strength is.
With Jobs and Apple, they're almost always wrong. Competitors rarely look beyond the product as released to see it for what it really is - an embryonic base on which to build. Apple will build on version 1.0 quickly, efficiently, cleanly and in a manner so completely integrated with existing features and Apple's other products, that consumers find it nearly irresistible. Predictably, competitors offerings will look like the fashion sense of the typical geek by comparison.
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The difference here is that the lobbyists on the pro-software patent side would actually be out-bankrolled and out-influenced by those against software patents. The people being blindsided by software patents are people like Apple, Microsoft, Google, IBM, RIM, eBay,etc. These people hold software patents largely for defensive purposes. They are not going to want Congress to reinstate a system where patent trolls or patent VCs can extort large sums from them at will.
Combine that with prevailing anti-corruption sentiment and you'll find that Congressmen and women won't want to touch the reinstatement of software patents with a ten foot pole.
Ironically, me.com, formerly mac.com. (ironic because when the service first started Apple were generally considered to be going out of business any day now).
You conveniently leave out the part where government intervention significantly enabled the OS competition we see today (for example, by prohibiting retaliation by MS if PC vendors also offered linux preloaded on machines).
The reality is that the market alone is not enough to ensure that consumers see real competition. Monopolies do arise, and government intervention is sometimes necessary to restore competition.
But that's not what a court would consider a "market." A market is a generic product or service category such as "mobile phone software" or "smart phone software," not something for a single firm's offering like "iPhone software." In the case of Microsoft, it was "Personal Computer Operating System Software," a category that includes Mac OS, Linux, *BSD, etc. The market Microsoft was found to have monopoly market power in was not "Windows Operating Systems."
Apple would have to worry about being found a legal monopoly only if iPhone software comes to completely dominate the market for "mobile phone software." We haven't reached that point yet. The continued growth of Android makes it somewhat unlikely.
Frankly, I hope that Apple iPhone software does become so dominant that courts do find it to have monopoly market power in the "mobile phone software" market. Then the DOJ and courts could step in and declare what are now legal though very unpleasant practices to be illegal attempts to leverage a monopoly.
US federal courts don't treat the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as the last word on what a monopoly is under the law.
Tthey rely instead on the Sherman Antitrust Act and its interpretation over the decades in previous federal court precedents as relates to the regulation of de facto monopolies. Note that a de facto monopoly does not ever have 100% market share (i.e., it is not the sole firm in the relevant market)
A real world, de facto monopoly (as opposed to a dictionary monopoly, or a de jure monopoly) is a firm that has what is known as monopoly market power: they are able to set prices without any regard for the prices of the offerings of existing competitiors.
Microsoft was ruled to have a monopoly in PC operating systems because they could charge $200 retail and $50 OEM when their competitors were offering a product with equivalent functionality for nothing at all.
I would hazard a guess that the native design tools do not make it impossible to make a badly designed or non-conformant GUI.
The native design tool, Interface Builder does alignment for you. You'd have to be using something else to end up with badly cropped text or misaligned buttons. IOW, you have to go out of your way to design a crap interface if you use Apple's tools in the manner recommended by Apple.
BTW, none of this means I think it's reasonable to ban source languages other than c/c++/objective-c. Apple could merely ban non-apple runtimes. This would allow coding in any language, as long as that was translated/compiled to one of the above before compilation by apple's toolchain and linked against apple's runtime.
Also, it doesn't make devs choose. Someone will be working on an objective-C to Android-Java cross compiler as we speak
No such cross-compiler is necessary:
Cross compiling UI code would be fairly pointless since the two platforms don't have the same UI design.
Cross compiling app logic is unnecessary as well because even the disputed iPhoneOS 4.0 agreement allows devs to code in C and C++, and Android has a native dev kit that lets devs code in C and C++.
So just write your app logic in C/C++, your iPhone UI in objective-c (or C/C++), and your Android UI in either C, C++, or Dalvik-Java.
Trying to exclude your competitors is only illegal when a monopoly does it. Otherwise it's just business as usual.
In defining a monopoly antitrust law cares about this:
The ability to set prices without regard to competitor's offerings
Apple is nowhere near this point in the pricing of either the iPhone, or it's iPhone developer program.
In the absence of a monopoly, the market must decide. The market hasn't spoken its final word yet. There's still plenty of market room for the Android platform to walk away with the whole ball of wax.
You do have to be a monopoly in order for leveraging market share against competitors to be illegal.
What we're seeing here is Apple leveraging their App Store market in a way that reduces competition from Adobe and Google in the smart phone market. This is perfectly legal right up to the point that Apple acquires a monopoly market share in smart phones. They're nowhere near that point, so leveraging their tiny (10%?) share of the smart phone market to attempt to box out Google and Adobe is perfectly legal. This is exactly how competitors compete all the time. It is desirable that competitors differentiate themselves in these sorts of ways so that the market can make choices. (N.B. differentiation is desirable - I'm not saying that I think it's desirable that Apple do what they did - I don't.)
The choice here is this: will the market prefer a clearly more restrictive but also more selective platform, or will the market prefer a less restrictive but also less selective platform. This sort of decision can and should be made in the marketplace, not in a court of law. If anyone wants to influence this market decision, they have only to choose Android (or some other smart phone platform, Palm, Blackberry, etc.) rather than the iPhone.
The usual legal standard for monopoly market share under US antitrust law is this:
the ability to set prices without regard to competitive offerings.
For Apple to have an effective monopoly on mp3 player hardware iPods would have to cost much much more than competitors - but they don't. For example, a 16GB Zune costs $169 and a 16GB iPod nano costs $179. To put this in context, when Microsoft was found to have a monopoly on PC operating systems, they were charging $200 retail and $50 OEM for Windows, when their competitor's OS, Linux, cost $0. Nada. Bupkis.
That's monopoly market power - the ability to charge $200 for something people can get for free.
So trying to paint Apple as an mp3 player monopoly would be a near impossible argument to make in a court of law.
It's not that you deserve to take whatever you want from your neighbor's house, but society deserves to, because the marginal cost of a copy of the key to your neighbor's house is basically zero. Charging money for sleeping in your neighbor's spare bedroom is a sign that there's an economic inefficiency somewhere and that society could be better off, theoretically somehow.
;^)
Re:Steve Jobs is not an engineer
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You're joking right? Half of those apps require flash or java, neither of which exist on the iPhone. The HTML5 ones are little more than toys, or simply don't work at all on an iPhone.
Apple gave devs the web app route before being forced into providing an SDK because Apple wanted to be the only entity that could provide full-featured apps. They continue to encourage the use of HTML5 so that users can see a clear distinction between quality iPhone native apps, written using Apple's SDK and making use of all of the platform's unique capabilities on the one hand, and generic, cross-platform, HTML5 toy crap on the other.
Which sort of app do you think the Apple faithful will choose? That's what I thought.
As another geezer who was actually there in the 80s I have to second your view. Apple lost the PC wars not because they made it hard for developers. They lost the PC wars because they were first out of the gate with a GUI system and took that opportunity to charge a price premium for their hardware. When the IBM PC platform became open - not by IBM's design, but by clean-room reverse engineering - there were now 50 manufacturers competing in that space which drove the price of an IBM-PC compatible to levels far below Apple's mac offerings.
Apple's developer tools and third party developer tools (Symantec and Metrowerks) were always adequate or quite good, as was their documentation. Apple's problem was with consumers and businesses, who wanted a low initial cost (and TCO be damned), not with developers.
But since Apple gets to determine which browsers exist on the iPhone and iPad, who's to say the next version of Apple's WebKit framework won't disable HTML5 ads (for example, by blocking content from known ad servers)?
After all, users won't care - they'll see it as a plus. And content providers will be forced to use iAd for all ads targeted at Safari-iPhone or Safari-iPad.
Most of Cocoa is proprietary. As a developer you get access to the headers, but not the source code of most of the Cocoa frameworks. Apple owns them and can change both interface and implementation at will, and frequently does - though they try to keep the interfaces (i.e., the headers) stable.
Owning the code, keeping it from view, and changing it at will - meets my definition of proprietary.
Maybe you were thinking of the open source clone GNUStep? Apple's platforms don't use GNUStep.
Might want to rtfa here. Under California law, journalists are treated differently with regard to search warrants under certain circumstances. Whether or not those circumstances hold here is open to question.
The journalists here will argue that they were protecting the identity of a source and that the warrant executed was therefore illegal under California law. It'll probably be up to a California appellate court to decide.
Sorry, gonna burn some karma here because I just can't stand seeing the english language murdered like this:
It makes me feel little-to-know sympathy for Gizmodo.
This should be "little to no symphathy" of course. Originally, from "little to none" describing a range, from little of something to none of it. Example:
Q: "How much stock do you put in his story?"
A: "Little to none".
When used as a modifier, it becomes "little to no". Example:
"I have little to no faith in his story."
OMAP processors are mostly ARM designs.
It's historically accurate if that's your question.
The author Bruce Tognazzini more commonly known as TOG, literally wrote the book on user interface design. He's arguably the greatest living expert on human-computer interaction and design.
He knows how Steve Jobs manages because he worked very closely with Jobs before, during, and after the development of the original Macintosh.
In the Art of War, Sun Tzu says: " When a general [is] unable to estimate the enemy’s strength ... the result must be rout."
This is the merely the beginning to understanding Job's secrecy. Naive competitors think that once the product is released they now know what the enemy's strength is, what Apple's strength is.
With Jobs and Apple, they're almost always wrong. Competitors rarely look beyond the product as released to see it for what it really is - an embryonic base on which to build. Apple will build on version 1.0 quickly, efficiently, cleanly and in a manner so completely integrated with existing features and Apple's other products, that consumers find it nearly irresistible. Predictably, competitors offerings will look like the fashion sense of the typical geek by comparison.
WARNING!
You have submitted a post containing elements of reading comprehension and nuanced logic. This will not be tolerated here. All posts must be one of:
- Humor (soviet russia, hot grits, indeterminate overlords, etc.)
- Troll (microsoft baiting, apple baiting, linux baitinc, etc.)
- Flame (microsoft flaming, apple flaming, linux flaming, etc.)
- Autistic Spectrum Disorder Verbal Manifestation (excessively literal minded application of first order predicate logic with as few points of reference as possible to the original article or the real world)
You have been warned!
In future, any posts not meeting these guidelines will be auto-moderated to:
(Score: 0, Thinking Human Being)
Such as?
Installing software written in a language other than C/C++/Objective-C?
The difference here is that the lobbyists on the pro-software patent side would actually be out-bankrolled and out-influenced by those against software patents. The people being blindsided by software patents are people like Apple, Microsoft, Google, IBM, RIM, eBay,etc. These people hold software patents largely for defensive purposes. They are not going to want Congress to reinstate a system where patent trolls or patent VCs can extort large sums from them at will.
Combine that with prevailing anti-corruption sentiment and you'll find that Congressmen and women won't want to touch the reinstatement of software patents with a ten foot pole.
The new domain contact info resolved back to some Russian place. BTW, there was no commercial value to the site.
1. resurrect deceased domain
2. drive-by malware
3. profit!!!
i.e., it may have had no commercial value when legitimately operated in the past, but it may well be a source of illegal revenue now.
Ironically, me.com, formerly mac.com. (ironic because when the service first started Apple were generally considered to be going out of business any day now).
Or rather than going to all this trouble, you could just recode your site to use HTML5...
You conveniently leave out the part where government intervention significantly enabled the OS competition we see today (for example, by prohibiting retaliation by MS if PC vendors also offered linux preloaded on machines).
The reality is that the market alone is not enough to ensure that consumers see real competition. Monopolies do arise, and government intervention is sometimes necessary to restore competition.
But that's not what a court would consider a "market." A market is a generic product or service category such as "mobile phone software" or "smart phone software," not something for a single firm's offering like "iPhone software." In the case of Microsoft, it was "Personal Computer Operating System Software," a category that includes Mac OS, Linux, *BSD, etc. The market Microsoft was found to have monopoly market power in was not "Windows Operating Systems."
Apple would have to worry about being found a legal monopoly only if iPhone software comes to completely dominate the market for "mobile phone software." We haven't reached that point yet. The continued growth of Android makes it somewhat unlikely.
Frankly, I hope that Apple iPhone software does become so dominant that courts do find it to have monopoly market power in the "mobile phone software" market. Then the DOJ and courts could step in and declare what are now legal though very unpleasant practices to be illegal attempts to leverage a monopoly.
So who chooses how far we zoom in or out in deciding if someone is a monopolist?
Federal courts. What the relevant market is can be a significant issue in anti-trust cases as your question suggests.
US federal courts don't treat the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as the last word on what a monopoly is under the law.
Tthey rely instead on the Sherman Antitrust Act and its interpretation over the decades in previous federal court precedents as relates to the regulation of de facto monopolies . Note that a de facto monopoly does not ever have 100% market share (i.e., it is not the sole firm in the relevant market)
A real world, de facto monopoly (as opposed to a dictionary monopoly, or a de jure monopoly) is a firm that has what is known as monopoly market power: they are able to set prices without any regard for the prices of the offerings of existing competitiors.
Microsoft was ruled to have a monopoly in PC operating systems because they could charge $200 retail and $50 OEM when their competitors were offering a product with equivalent functionality for nothing at all.
I would hazard a guess that the native design tools do not make it impossible to make a badly designed or non-conformant GUI.
The native design tool, Interface Builder does alignment for you. You'd have to be using something else to end up with badly cropped text or misaligned buttons. IOW, you have to go out of your way to design a crap interface if you use Apple's tools in the manner recommended by Apple.
BTW, none of this means I think it's reasonable to ban source languages other than c/c++/objective-c. Apple could merely ban non-apple runtimes. This would allow coding in any language, as long as that was translated/compiled to one of the above before compilation by apple's toolchain and linked against apple's runtime.
Also, it doesn't make devs choose. Someone will be working on an objective-C to Android-Java cross compiler as we speak
No such cross-compiler is necessary:
Cross compiling UI code would be fairly pointless since the two platforms don't have the same UI design.
Cross compiling app logic is unnecessary as well because even the disputed iPhoneOS 4.0 agreement allows devs to code in C and C++, and Android has a native dev kit that lets devs code in C and C++.
So just write your app logic in C/C++, your iPhone UI in objective-c (or C/C++), and your Android UI in either C, C++, or Dalvik-Java.
Trying to exclude your competitors is only illegal when a monopoly does it. Otherwise it's just business as usual.
In defining a monopoly antitrust law cares about this:
The ability to set prices without regard to competitor's offerings
Apple is nowhere near this point in the pricing of either the iPhone, or it's iPhone developer program.
In the absence of a monopoly, the market must decide. The market hasn't spoken its final word yet. There's still plenty of market room for the Android platform to walk away with the whole ball of wax.
You do have to be a monopoly in order for leveraging market share against competitors to be illegal.
What we're seeing here is Apple leveraging their App Store market in a way that reduces competition from Adobe and Google in the smart phone market. This is perfectly legal right up to the point that Apple acquires a monopoly market share in smart phones. They're nowhere near that point, so leveraging their tiny (10%?) share of the smart phone market to attempt to box out Google and Adobe is perfectly legal. This is exactly how competitors compete all the time. It is desirable that competitors differentiate themselves in these sorts of ways so that the market can make choices. (N.B. differentiation is desirable - I'm not saying that I think it's desirable that Apple do what they did - I don't.)
The choice here is this: will the market prefer a clearly more restrictive but also more selective platform, or will the market prefer a less restrictive but also less selective platform. This sort of decision can and should be made in the marketplace, not in a court of law. If anyone wants to influence this market decision, they have only to choose Android (or some other smart phone platform, Palm, Blackberry, etc.) rather than the iPhone.
The usual legal standard for monopoly market share under US antitrust law is this:
the ability to set prices without regard to competitive offerings.
For Apple to have an effective monopoly on mp3 player hardware iPods would have to cost much much more than competitors - but they don't. For example, a 16GB Zune costs $169 and a 16GB iPod nano costs $179. To put this in context, when Microsoft was found to have a monopoly on PC operating systems, they were charging $200 retail and $50 OEM for Windows, when their competitor's OS, Linux, cost $0. Nada. Bupkis.
That's monopoly market power - the ability to charge $200 for something people can get for free.
So trying to paint Apple as an mp3 player monopoly would be a near impossible argument to make in a court of law.
It's not that you deserve to take whatever you want from your neighbor's house, but society deserves to, because the marginal cost of a copy of the key to your neighbor's house is basically zero. Charging money for sleeping in your neighbor's spare bedroom is a sign that there's an economic inefficiency somewhere and that society could be better off, theoretically somehow.
Ive, not Ivy.