rowan.depomerai

Fair disclosure right now: this is going to be a boring post about whether Apple are evil or wonderful, and many of you won’t give a rat’s backside. But it’s not very technical, it’s about business ethics, so I hope you’ll give it a punt…

Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo.com and generally respected geek recently presented The Case Against Apple in Five Parts, explaining that he’s an Apple fan but has grown fed up with them recently. Much has been said in many places about the merits of his arguments, but the general concensus seems to be that he’s mostly talking rubbish. However, he’s talking enough sense to be worth considering, and I don’t disagree with everything he says. I had a lively discussion around this with a colleague, who urged me to blog my thoughts, so I am. I recommend reading the original post, and perhaps one or two of the other good responses. But anyway, here’s the relevant bits, along with my take on them…

1. Destroying MP3 player innovation through anti-competitive practices

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There is no technical reason why the iTunes ecosystem shouldn’t allow the ability to sync with any MP3 player (in fact, iTunes did support other players once upon a time), save furthering Apple’s dominance with their own over-priced players. Quickly answer the following question: who are the number two and three MP3 players in the market? Exactly. Most folks can’t name one, let alone two, brands of MP3 players.

On my trips to Japan, China and Korea over the past couple of years, I made it a point to visit the consumer electronics marketplaces like Akihabira. They are filled with not dozens, but hundreds, of MP3 players. They are cheap, feature-rich and open in nature. They have TV tuners, high-end audio recorders, radio tuners, dual-headphone jacks built-in and any number of innovations that the iPod does not. You simply will not see those here because of Apple’s inexcusable lack of openness.

Not only does Apple not build in a simple API to attach devices to iTunes, they actually fight technically and legally block people from building tools to make iTunes more compatible.

Think for a moment about what your reaction would be if Microsoft made the Zune the only MP3 player compatible with Windows. There would be 4chan riots, denial of service attacks and Digg’s front page would be plastered with pundit editorials claiming Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were Borg.

Why, then, does Steve Jobs get a pass?

Steve Jobs gets a pass because we are all enabling him to be a jerk. We buy the products and we say nothing when our rights are stripped away. We’ve been seduced by Steve Jobs: he lifts another shiny object over his head with a new eco-friendly feature and we all melt like screaming schoolgirls at Shea Stadium in ‘65.

Simple solution and opportunity: An iTunes API which allows the attachment of any mass storage device,not just a short list of players that jumped through Apple’s hoops. If need be, perhaps consumers pay a simple licensing fee of $1-5 a unit to attach a non-Apple MP3 player to iTunes (i.e. pure profit for Apple).

The whole argument here is flawed. To say that by disallowing other media players from syncing with iTunes Apple is stifling competition is rubbish. Apple developed a nice piece of software in iTunes, and so that effort gets tied to their players – a cynical but accurate view might be that by not supporting other players they avoid consumers blaming them when they have problems with other players. But here’s the thing – Apple doesn’t stop anyone else making their own media software! iTunes isn’t so great that people would choose the iPod just to use iTunes, if anything, people do the opposite; use iTunes because they have an iPod. The clear example here is the Palm Pre, where Palm couldn’t be bothered to write their own software, so they wrote a hack to make the Pre work with iTunes and passed it off as a feature. Yes, Apple broke it, but they warned Palm before the Pre ever shipped that they would likely break it. It’s not stifling the competition, the Pre is a good product, all Palm had to do was make good sync software to go with it, but they didn’t bother.

2. Monopolistic practices in telecommunications

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Apple’s iPhone is a revolutionary product that has devolved almost all of the progress made in cracking–wait for it–AT&T’s monoply in the ’70s and ’80s. We broke up the Bell Phone only to have it put back together by the iPhone. Telecommunications choice is gone for Apple users. If you buy an Apple and want to have a seemless experience with your iPhone, you must get in bed with AT&T, and as we like to say in the technology space, “AT&T is the suck.”

Simple solution and opportunity: Not only let the iPhone work on any carrier, but put *two* SIM card slots on the iPhone and let users set which applications use which services. (Your phone could be Verizon and your browser Sprint!) Imagine having two SIM cards with 3G that were able to bond together to perform superfast uploads and downloads to YouTube.

I agree here to a great extent, but it’s important to note that carrier exclusivity is an old problem in the phone industry, not one invented by Apple. No-one complained about the O2 XDA or the T-Mobile sidekick. Just because the iPhone is more popular, Apple gets the heat. However, yes, it would be nice if the iPhone was available on more carriers. But note that in many countries it is, and all the indications are that the iPhone will be available on more networks once existing exclusivity agreements expire.

The article also ignores the fact that Apple has done a lot for the good of the mobile phone industry, and a lot to help handset makers break the stranglehold that carriers had on them. By vastly expanding the market for premium quality phones, they’ve allowed other manufacturers to produce more decent quality products and charge a decent price for them, rather than being forced into making “free” rubbish products because the networks want the price to look good. They’ve forced networks to innovate too – take Visual Voicemail, something tried by others before but never successfully, because getting handset makers and carriers to work together was virtually impossible.

3. Draconian App Store policies that are, frankly, insulting

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Like lemmings, we fell for your bar charts extolling the openness of the iPhone App platform and its massive array of applications. We over-paid for your phone–which you render obsolete every 13 months, like clockwork–and then signed our lives away to AT&T. The way you pay us back is by becoming the thought police, deciding what applications we can consume on the device we over-paid for!

Yes, every application on the phone has to approved by Apple, and if you were interested in something adult in nature…well…you can’t do that.

Apple’s justification for this nonsense is that they have to protect AT&T’s network. Oh really? Aren’t there dozens and dozen of open phones on everyone’s network? The network hasn’t crashed yet, and even if someone did create a malicious iPhone application, you would know EXACTLY who was running the application and be able to block and/or turn off their phone. The network was MADE to deal with these issues on a NETWORK level. To say you have to control people down to the application level defies all logic. A second year CS student understands this.

Who in their right mind feels the need to control the application-level anyway? It’s absurd.

Imagine for a moment if every application on Windows Mobile or Windows XP had to be approved by Microsoft–how would you react? Exactly. Once again we’ve enabled Steve Jobs’ insane control freak tendencies. This relationship is beyond disfunctional–we are co-dependent.

Simple solution: Apple could have a basic system setting that says “Allow Non-Approved Applications.” When you click this setting, a popup could come on warning that, if you click this setting, you are waiving your previously-understood customer service arrangement (i.e. only people with approved applications can hand over their money at the Genius bar).

OK, let’s start with the first paragraph. “your phone–which you render obsolete every 13 months” Err…. Hello? That’s rubbish. Apple provide new models on a roughly yearly basis, yes. They also provide software updates with major new features FREE to existing users. Let’s contrast that with HTC & Windows Mobile as an example. HTC release new models just about every month, while Microsoft don’t provide a simple updates system for their OS, and in fact say that current Windows Mobile phone won’t be able to upgrade to version 6.5 let alone 7. Apple releasing new hardware does not make the old hardware obsolete, far from it. If you’re geeky enough to want to upgrade (as I am), then that’s your choice, and is no worse with Apple than with any other handset manufacturer.

As for the App Store approvals process, over 95% of all apps are approved. Age ratings now mean adult material is allowed, contrary to the article (albeit not hardcore porn, but I can’t say that bothers me!), and often the approvals process helps users out a lot. An app I love just had an update rejected because it presented iPod touch users with an option to use “vibrate only” for notifications. Fair enough really, that would have been very annoying and confusing for iPod users whose device doesn’t have a vibrate function. I also think it’s reasonable that Apple controls what it sells on its store, and you do have to remember that Apple charges less to host, distribute, promote and provide a payment infrastructure for the App Store than Blackberry, HandAndGo (the most popular Windows Mobile store) et al, so it’s an attractive proposition for developers, not to mention the fact that they charge nothing to provide those services for free apps. However, I do agree that it would be good to have a way to download and install apps from elsewhere direct onto my device. No argument from me there.

4. Being a horrible hypocrite by banning other browsers on the iPhone

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Opera is a fantastic browser built by a company in Oslo, Norway. In fact, a decade ago, I had a speaking gig there and got to interview the CEO of the company for Silicon Alley Reporter. (Sidebar: Man, do I miss being a journalist. I wish I could split 50% of my time being a journalist and 50% of my time being a CEO.) For over a decade, Opera has been making lighting-fast, lightweight and quirky browsers. Long before Apple launched Safari, with the goal of designing the fastest browswer on the Web, Opera was already there.

Opera’s mobile browsers are “full of WIN,” as the kids like to say these days. If you’re a Windows Mobile or Blackberry user, you’ve probably downloaded them and enjoyed their WINness. The company started an iPhone browser project but gave up when faced with Apple’s absurd and unclear mandate to developers: Don’t create services which duplicate the functionality of Apple’s own software. In other words: “Don’t compete with us or we will not let you in the game.”

The irony of this is not lost on anyone who had a computer before they had an Internet connection. Apple was more than willing to pile on after Microsoft’s disasterous inclusion of Internet Explorer with Windows. In fact, what Apple is doing is 100x worse than what Microsoft did. You see, Microsoft simply included their browser in Windows, still allowing other browsers to be installed. In Apple’s case, they are not only bundling their browser with the iPhone, but they are BLOCKING other browsers from being installed.

Simple solution and opportunity: Don’t be a control freak and hypocrite. Allow people to pick their browser; the competition to make a better browser will increase the overall use of iPhones and mobile data services.

Yeah, that was a bad move, but they changed their minds. C’est la vie. I don’t agree that Opera on a WinMob device is anything like as nice as Safari, but that’s beside the point. I agree that other browsers should be allowed, and they now are.

5. Blocking the Google Voice Application on the iPhone

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Personal Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.