Apple Alone Is Dumber Than Everybody

Seems that just about every day there is a new story breaking that Apple is making another dictatorial decision about applications on their iPhone and iPad products. Apple justifies these moves in the name of maintaining application quality, family friendliness, or appeasing the creators of copyrighted content. Whatever their excuse, it's dumb.There are oh-so-many examples, so let's just look at a couple of these bonehead blunders. First is the new rule in the Apple developer agreement that dictates the tools developers can use. The former Apple exec who wrote that blog says, "Who, in his right mind, expects Steve Jobs to let Adobe (and other) cross-platform application development tools control his (I mean the iPhone OS) future?" Yeah, come to think of it why didn't Bill Gates require that developers use only Microsoft tools to build Windows applications?

Another example is Apple's incredibly capricious and glacially slow process to approve iPhone/iPad applications. Opera was lucky with its browser; it only had to wait three weeks for approval. Others have had their applications approved and later removed for trivial reasons. A prize-winning political cartoonist had his app rejected because "it contains content that ridicules public figures." Hey Apple, that's pretty much the definition of political cartoons.

Perhaps the best analogy for Apple's closed iPhone/iPad universe is the one Professor Ed Felten gave in his Freedom to Tinker blog entry. He compares the iPad's closed and restrictive environment to Disneyland. It's a fun place thanks to its centralized planning and common vision for what people want in an amusement park. But it's also unreal, and limited by the goals of the people who run the park. It's not enough to have a killer idea for a new Disneyland ride; you have to convince Disneyland it's a killer idea or it can never get off the ground.

For the past 30 years, technology has been able to advance quickly because it proceeds at the pace of chaos. IBM's carefully planned mainframe computing model fell victim to the personal computer phenomenon. Microsoft led that charge, but they were cut down to size by the Internet. Along the way there have been thousands of failures as well, but the successes were largely chosen by the people, who rewarded good and useful ideas from many sources -- even when imperfect -- with their dollars and attention.

A closed panel of Apple employees cannot make decisions that serve users better than the users themselves. The user-driven process will be more chaotic and probably not as elegant, but a heck of a lot more transparent. The reputation of good apps will ensure that they succeed, and bad apps will get their just desserts as well. Sure people can game the system, but if you've ever seen the dozens of me-too garbage apps in Apple's store you know that game is going on already. Whenever there are rules there will be people who test their limits.

Users have historically done a respectable job of picking and making the winners in technology, and they also correct their mistakes over time. In the past, Apple has often been one of the chosen winners; that success has somehow made them think they are smarter than their own users. Some users may love this new Disneyland that Apple has created, but most will prefer to make their own decisions.