Interesting article,

[Benjamin Scott]

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 10:41 AM, Alan Johnson <alan at datdec.com> wrote:
>>> > Well, except MacOSX has specific hardware.
>>>
>>>  Indeed, that's a big part of Apple's strategy.  Design the hardware
>>> and the software together, and they'll work well together.  And there
>>> is something to be said for that.
>>
>> And that's one of Apple's prime advantages.
>
> Advantage?  Well, for Apple, it is an advantages over MS, but certainly not
> for the users.

  Eh, I'm not sure about that.  If you buy from Apple's extremely
limited pool of products, things tend to work together far better than
I've seen on any Microsoft-compatible platform, even if you buy from a
single vendor.

  The IBM pee sea is a loose collection of vaguely similar things
which happen to work together sometimes -- and that's being kind.
Even if you buy everything from a single vendor, things rarely work as
well together as they do when one company designs everything.  The
IBM-PC platform was not designed -- it evolved.  Like the house that
Jack built, things have been stuck on, later removed, changed,
modified, extended, and reinterpreted so many times, by so many
different actors, it's a wonder it stays standing.  The single-vendor
solution has to be built to work in that environment, and that's
harder to do.

  In contrast, the Apple dictatorship does mean that standards are
actually... well, *standard*.  Look at Jerry Feldman's problems with
partitioning.  Ask three different programs how to do partitioning on
an IBM-PC, and you'll get at least four different, mutually
incompatible, data-destroying answers.  In the People's Republic of
Cupertino that would never happen.  Whatever Apple decrees is The One
True Way to do things.

  Does this limit freedom?  Absolutely!  Would I, personally, give up
that freedom to get the uniformity of design?  No way!  But for
someone who's interests consist entirely of surfing the web, listening
to music, and doing the occasional resume or spreadsheet -- they see a
real appeal in having someone else do all your thinking for them.

  As Larry Wall said about Perl, "Perl doesn't stop you from doing
stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever
things".  Well, Apple stops their platform from doing stupid things.
As with any dictatorship, things are great as long as you happen to
agree with the dictator.  But if one day the dictator decrees that
computers should only be available with glossy screens, and you want a
matte screen... well, too bad for you.

  Or: Apple no longer makes printers.  So if you want to print from
your oh-so-perfect Mac, you have to leave the Apple utopia, and come
back to the ecosystem of the mass market.  That's something Apple
doesn't mention in their advertisements.  Which is interesting,
because their target market includes a lot of people who like to print
everything...

> The only reason Windows has dominance over Linux is inertia ...

  Just as the only reason mankind is limited to one planet is inertia.

> ... and the only reason Apple has dominance over Linux is marketing.

  Certainly, Apple's marketing is brilliant.  They know exactly what
people want to hear, and they say it.  But, in all fairness, they also
steer their ship in that direction as well.  They see a lot of people
frustrated with the pee sea, and they build their platform -- the car
with the hood welded shut -- specifically to appeal to that crowd.

> Apple could have
> crushed MS by now if they had gone with the GPL attitude instead of picking
> BSD so they could keep all their toys to themselves.

  Yah, I'm not buying that.  If all you needed was the GPL, Linux
would already have crushed Microsoft.  It's had 20 years and Microsoft
has only gotten stronger in that time.  (When Linux first came out,
you also had a fleet of commercial Unixes, Novel, several BSDs, OS/2,
BeOS, and all sorts of other bit player platforms.  Today it's all
Microsoft, with Apple and Linux nipping at their heels.  If I were to
draw a conclusion from that, it would be that GPL is good for crushing
bit players, not the big guys.)

> To be clear in limiting my own zealotry, I concede that there are a number a
> specific use cases that are better addressed by Windows or Apple.  However,
> the vast majority of those are catch-22's like the ones described in the
> article that started this thread.

  Absolutely correct!  However, the fact that's it's a hard problem to
solve doesn't mean it isn't a problem.  Indeed, the fact that it's a
hard problem is why it hasn't been solved yet, and why the best idea
anyone has come up with is sheer persistence over time.

-- Ben