Michael Tsai: Welcome to iPhone: Your Crappy Mac of Tomorrow, Today

He's not wrong. Apple's garden-walling was become extensive enough that it's gone beyond ensuring a good experience for their users, and has started to damage the platform. This should have been obvious to them since jailbreaking became so common, but I guess it hasn't quite sunk in yet. Apple needs to allow people to use their platform, or it won't become as good as it deserves to be.

So we seem to have these facts: The iPhone platform is a commercial success for Apple. The iPhone platform is a commercial success for 3rd party devs. The iPhone platform is tightly controlled by a vendor whose actions range from understandable lies to misleading behaviour and outright bullying.<p>So, is there anything to be criticised or is commercial success a justification for everything that is lawful?<p>I think being the uber cool bully who lends his followers success for a while but may turn against them at any moment is a dangerous long term strategy.<p>It basically means that Apple's growth rates must keep up with the inconvenience caused by their behaviour. And I don't mean just intellectual inconvenience that affects only a small number of people (closed vs open platforms, etc). I mean getting harassed by a vendor has a cost and that cost needs to be covered by growth. It's as simple as that.

So far this year, I have:<p>1) rented a video from iTunes which I could not play on my iPod, because it was 2 years old and no longer supported.<p>2) Not been able to utilize my eclipse plugins that run on Java 1.6 due to Apple not supporting 64-bit carbon (required for eclipse on osx). This is after they took an extra 12 months just to support java 1.6 at all.<p>Apple made both of these decisions consciously. They make good products to create a good customer experience, then base support purely on ROI with no concern for customer experience.

What I thought was most interesting about the linked article was the charge that Apple has been misleading it's developers, not whether Apple's iPhone strategy is right or wrong from a business or technical perspective. At what point does putting the best possible spin on things cross over into outright lying?<p>Is it fair to characterize Apple's guidance to developers as misleading?<p>If so, will Apple's behavior eventually drive away developers, or can they always count on developers sticking around, so long as they continue to produce hot products like the iPhone?

I completely agree with you. I think that there are very smart reasons for why Steve Jobs did what he did.<p>When the iPhone version 1.0 was released AT&#38;T probably was still in the "I'm a big carrier, hear me roar" kind of mentality. But as the iPhone blew up, AT&#38;T released that it needed to adjust quick, so perhaps that's how Apple was able to push through their SDK.<p>I think in general Apple just has to be more open with it's fan cult.

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