Life Is Rich

I really like Apple products – particularly their OS (be it for the Mac or the iPhone). I’ve never been particularly fond of Apple the company – primarily due to their apparent indifference to developers and even customers – an almost elite aloofness that states, we’re better than you, our products are superior – you’ll do it our way or you can go elsewhere. Often, it’s worked – at least over the last half-dozen years or so – because their products really are that good.

Unfortunately, I think this attitude has hindered broader acceptance and success. I’ve blogged before about Apple’s abysmal customer support, maintenance and repair policies – or lack of them (see previous rant). Limiting customers to a single avenue of hardware repair that can take days and weeks, including long waits at a retail store, is just reprehensible – especially if you expect to sell to businesses.

The iPhone app store is another good example of this arrogance. Marco Arment at Marco.org has an excellent blog post about Apple’s indifference to the issues developers are currently facing.

This arrogance and disregard for customers and developers will lead to Apple’s downfall if not corrected. It may be slow. It may be years. But it will happen. You can’t treat your partners and your customers this way forever – even with superior products.

This is awesome…and creepily somewhat true.

UPDATE: More fun parody and comedy at Google’s expense from Fake Steve Jobs, some not so fun poking at the frightening behemoth that Google has become and its invasive nature (which I’ve belabored before – see Buy a Good Tinfoil Hat, Tinfoil Redux and Dark Clouds), and some pissed off Linux people.

If Android wasn’t enough, now we have Google Chrome OS. Welcome to the wonderfully bland, drab and unpleasant world of ubiquitous web applications. You can pry my native applications and my OS tailored for user experience (not one tailored to said companies cloud services) from my cold, dead fingers. Funny, one of my longest posts, and likely much better written than this sleep-deprived rant, follows a similar vein – when Steve Jobs told us that developers could do great things with the iPhone – you don’t even need an SDK, just use the web! It took less than a year for those words to be eaten. How many native applications are now available on the iPhone? (More than 50,000)

On a side note, I’m sure Chrome will run well on those netbooks that everyone is returning after realizing that they are nothing more than really bad web browsing calculators (and yes, I have used one). It has all the limitations of my iPhone AND my laptop with the benefits of neither. It’s the worst of both worlds.

For some reason, this news just really bums me out. Web apps are the dregs of computing. The lowest common denominator. We should be moving in a different direction. Using the web as the distributor of information head-ended by native applications that can take full advantage of the hardware and resources available to the end-user – i.e. web services. The answer is not to try to cram more crap through a browser (i.e. HTML5, Silverlight, Flash, Java applets, etc).

This is why I use a Mac. User experience. Thoughtful design. Great applications – both those provided by Apple with iLife and the OS as well as those from third-party developers who care about the user experience and quality. No matter how much functionality you add, you can only do so much with a browser. Not to mention, you have to fight long and hard as a developer to attain every inch. I did web apps for over five years – it sucks. You work your butt off to build an application that can never attain the level of quality, fit, and finish that is the goal of every good developer. It’s depressing. Your handicapped from the get-go.

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you will see every problem as a nail.” Abraham Maslow

Not to knock some incredible work that people have done on the web (I mean, look at the .me Mail app – it’s amazing, but I wouldn’t in a million years choose it over its native counterpart). But no matter what examples you may have of amazing web sites, it’s not the norm, nor is it easy to accomplish. The browser wasn’t meant for this. We’ve bastardized it as the platform for all app delivery (or at least Google has). Please, let the insanity stop! This is not the world I want to live (develop) in!

Maybe computing is now like Wal-Mart or mass-produced plasticky crap that always breaks after two weeks. Lowest common denominator, cheap, thoughtless. Native applications, innovation and thoughtful design are relegated to the antique dealers and the rare specialty shops of craftsman made products – sequestered to the incredibly small minority of people who seem to care or haven’t been brainwashed in expecting so much less from their computing experience.

UPDATE: Someone in the mainstream press apparently agrees. I had over 200 visitors to this site in an hour after a link to this page found it’s way to the linkback section of the original Google Blog article. Interestingly, I had no comments. Either my post really really sucked, or everyone generally agreed and didn’t have anything to comment about. Probably a little of both.

So, Pandora will live another day [in the U.S.]

Head in the sand, dying technology, idiot comment of the day by National Association of Broadcasters guy:

“This is good for music,” said Dennis Wharton, the executive vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters. “It sets a rate where artists will receive royalities for the music they produce.”

Wharton said although these “pureplay” Webcasts are popular, he doesn’t see this decision affecting local radio stations. He said the 235,000,000 people who listen to the radio every day will probably stick with it. “It’s hard to beat a free and local option,” he said.