The new evil empire
Locked
 
|
From: http://baselinescenario.com/2010/05/30/personal-computing-apple-google-2/
- Sent using Google Toolbar Apple wants to be the new Microsoft. It wants you to buy applications
that run locally on your computer
iPad, and it sees its competitive advantage as having the most
developers and the most applications (hence all those “there’s an app
for that” ads). As Microsoft showed, if you can get a lead and become
the developers’ platform of choice, you can benefit from network
effects. ... In April, Apple changed the terms of the iPhone developer agreement to prevent developers from using cross-compilers to create iPhone apps. A cross-compiler is a tool that allows you to take an application you wrote for one platform, push a button, and repackage the application for another platform (in this case, iPhone OS). The immediate target of this was Adobe, which was developing a tool that would enable developers to take Flash apps, push a button, and make them into iPhone apps. This simplest explanation for this is that Apple, as the market leader, wants to make it harder for people to develop for multiple platforms at the same time. “Write once, run anywhere” — the slogan of Java, but also the essence of developing for the web — is bad for Apple, and they want to make it as hard as possible. (John Gruber makes a different argument that Apple wants control over their platform and doesn’t want cross-compilers between it and the developers, but that interpretation is not inconsistent with mine.) In other words, if you’re number one, then openness just helps the competition, because if developers have to choose just one platform, they’re going to choose yours. So Apple is competitive; we knew that already. And they don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the 1980s and 1990s; we knew that already, too. But I think the important point is that they are promoting a model of personal computing where most of the developers write for the iPhone OS, and if you want to use their applications you have to buy an Apple hardware product. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
|
|
The paragraph before your quote is pretty interesting too. Interesting tension between developers who want to monetize their apps and consumers who want everything free. Perhaps the App Store model is a good compromise where $2.99 is close enough to free to suit everyone.
Apple prefers the app model for two big reasons. First, it makes their products stickier, since you’re not just buying an iPad, you’re buying Apple’s whole system for delivering stuff onto the iPad. Second, it seems that people are willing to pay for apps while they are unwilling to pay for anything through a browser. So people will pay $1.99 for an app that plays some game when you can already play the same game for free on a web site somewhere. Maybe people think of apps as standalone objects that have some value and that they can buy, while they see web sites just as destinations that they go to and that should be free. But as long as people will pay for apps, that means that Apple can make money by selling them to you — and by preventing developers from selling them to you directly. Sent from my iPhone
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
|
Administrator
|
I think an interesting question is "why are apps better than web-apps?". In other words, we were all on the bus that felt the browser was the new OS, and that web-apps were the new replacement for "old fashioned" desktop apps. But now we find we were wrong, folks preferred apps after all.
Why? What is the evolution we're seeing? After all, wasn't last month's discussion about Flash vs HTML/CSS/JavaScript standards? Where in heck did these puny little apps (not web-apps) come from? Is the browser not the OS of the future? Are apps back? Have we lost platform-independence? What's going on?! :) -- Owen On May 31, 2010, at 5:42 PM, Saul Caganoff wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
|
|
AppleSoft is the answer.
What was the question? --Doug
On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 9:48 PM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
|
|
If the Google-pad runs everything in a Chrome browser, web-apps will be back. The problem with apps is that you can't carry your laptop around with you very easily.
-- Russ Abbott ______________________________________ Professor, Computer Science California State University, Los Angeles cell: 310-621-3805 blog: http://russabbott.blogspot.com/ vita: http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/ ______________________________________ On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 8:52 PM, Douglas Roberts <[hidden email]> wrote: AppleSoft is the answer. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
|
|
In reply to this post by Owen Densmore
Owen--
I think we can, and do, have it both ways. Most of the apps that I use work just fine on the desktop and in the cloud. There are exceptions, of course, but given that most of the day-to-day things have import/export at the very least, then word processing, spreadsheets, mind-mapping and even off-line e-mail get the job done. Heavy-load SQL or GIS stuff, not today, but surely tomorrow. Seems to me most folks are reaping the harvest of both environments. -tom On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 9:48 PM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
-- ========================================== J. T. Johnson Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA www.analyticjournalism.com 505.577.6482(c) 505.473.9646(h) http://www.jtjohnson.com [hidden email] "Be Your Own Publisher" http://indiepubwest.com ========================================== ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
|
|
In reply to this post by Owen Densmore
Owen
Why are cars better than boats (to extend your vehicle metaphor)? Is it the promise of flying cars, amphibious cars, submarine cars, etc. etc. ? Perhaps the truth lies in what the user (public) is prepared to buy into (literally) and price performance. We are suckers for hype. Then there is the painless payment models that Apple has tapped into and perhaps the painless app development environment so anyone can make an 'app'. Tom has a point about 'horses for courses' (tho' he didn't use the phrase). Web latency kills some application ideas. Insufficient computing power kills others. The browser computing overhead can get in the way. But browsers, desk(lap)tops, smart phones, tvs, bicycles still have a place. Standards will continue to be discussed. Computing power continues to increase. Developers will load up software (including browsers) to take advantage of increasing hardware power. Gadgets are great. The sun will rise in the east. Technical convergence is fine until someone finds a business opportunity in divergence. Aren't creativity, innovation, cost externalization, proprietary technologies, free enterprise great? Mind you, I think Apple has a real long term problem with developers' needs to create once and deliver on multiple platforms. Meanwhile, Apple makes hay while the sun shines, so this too will change. The world is made of two kinds of people:
Thanks Robert C On 5/31/10 9:48 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: I think an interesting question is "why are apps better than web-apps?". In other words, we were all on the bus that felt the browser was the new OS, and that web-apps were the new replacement for "old fashioned" desktop apps. But now we find we were wrong, folks preferred apps after all. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
«
Return to Friam
|
1 view|%1 views
| Free forum by Nabble | Edit this page |