Yesterday I read a very interesting article by Ryan Tate of Gawker regarding the ongoing battle between Mac and Adobe, in which he gets into a pretty vigorous email tussle with Steve Jobs. Ryan's tone is pretty rough - he has his own personal axe to grind with the guy - but he makes some interesting points.
Now, I'm no fan of any corporation of their size - I just don't believe they're good for the world - and I too have my own personal axe to grind, in my case with elitism and with greed, so I was suprised to be at the point of empathy with Steve's personable and persuasive argument when I suddenly - and very clearly - saw the light.
Steve's argument that Apple simply wants to do the right for its users is a disingenuous load of bull. Why? Because he's choosing to ignore what I see as a fundamental aspect of his company's business ethos.
He doesn't want his hardware to interact well with anyone else's. He doesn't care. In fact it's your fault. You should have bought his hardware. It was your choice, a poor choice or - far more likely - it was a poor man's choice. His stuff isn't for poor people. It's elitist. There. I said it. Apple are elitist.
Because anyone who has ever installed iTunes on a Windows PC knows that it's bloatware, a resource hog, stuffed with auto-updaters, TSRs and useless memory-resident shite. That is just a fact. Steve will tell you that this is the computer or the operating system's fault, but that's an empty argument. Plenty of things run just fine on a PC.
Apple are elitist, by simple virtue of the price and quality of the products they produce. It's like Mercedes trying to be Volkswagen, the computer company of the 'people'. It just ain't so. They ain't that cheap.
No, I don't think it's about your users, Steve; it's about your customers. It's not ok to suggest that we - the users, the developers and publishers - all have the freedom to ignore your hardware or your platforms. The world isn't like that. 50% of my friends and colleagues use Macs, but the rest use PC - some Win, some Lin. Fuck them, right?
Not only that, but your customers - these users that you speak of - have just as big a gripe. They want to modify their system settings without being permanently locked out of their devices. They would like to write their own apps. The would like to use as much of their batteries as they choose.
Steve Jobs, methinks thou dost talketh a enormous pile of flipping bollards. Stop pretending that you want the best for your 'users', or even your customers. Those millions of people that buy your over-priced, over-advertised, cool-to-look-at hardware.. with its closed-shop software. Cool.