Apple likes to market itself as the user-friendly, creativity enabling alternative to Microsoft, and perhaps in some ways it is, but the company's Madison Avenue crafted image has lost a little luster recently. Owners of its latest Savior Machine, the iPhone, have discovered Apple is shortsightedly intent on maintaining strict control of their product rather than allowing users to innovate and customize it the way they want.A PR flap has erupted over the company's mishandling of a routine software patch that wiped out the third party apps that users had installed to extend the device's functionality (see the New York Times story Altered iPhones Freeze Up). Companies such as Google and FireFox have recognized for quite some time the advantage of giving the geeks of the world the ability to hack the code behind their services and create the mash-ups and add-ons that lead to a more robust product. Apple hasn't quite caught on yet.
I have a friend who has an iPhone and don't get me wrong, it's a very neat little device that can do a lot of cool stuff. One of its main flaws is the AT&T phone network that users have been forced to sign on to when they buy the iPhone. As wonderful a gadget as it is, if you can't reliably make calls on it, the name becomes quite absurd. Adventurous owners have tried to circumvent that problem by tweaking the phone to work on other networks, but Apple's distributed software update has caused these hacked phones to seize up. The company's official position on the deadened phones: "hard cheese."
Infuriating your most tech-savvy customers is never a good idea, especially for a company that tries to appeal to an anti-establishment clientèle. I don't know what kind of pay off they got from AT&T, but restricting iPhoners to a single carrier makes as much sense as hardwiring desktops and laptops to work with only one ISP.
Technology has advanced to the point now that business attempts at complete control will almost always backfire. You don't restrict the uses of a product, but rather make it flexible enough to meet needs you may not have originally imagined. The punk-rock DIY mentality of my youth has become much more common today as the new digital tools have democratized skills once reserved for experts. Businesses with a little vision will learn to encourage and take advantage of this yen to tinker.
Complete Control
by The Clash
They said release 'Remote Control'
But we didn't want it on the label
They said, "Fly to Amsterdam"
The people laughed but the press went mad
Ooh ooh ooh someone's really smart
Ooh ooh ooh complete control, yeah that's a laugh
On the last tour my mates couldn't get in
I'd open up the back door but they'd get run out again
At every hotel we was met by the Law
Come for the party - come to make sure!
Ooh ooh ooh have we done something wrong?
Ooh ooh ooh complete control, even over this song
You're my guitar hero
They said we'd be artistically free
When we signed that bit of paper
They meant we'll make a lotsa mon-ee
An' worry about it later
Ooh ooh ooh I'll never understand
Ooh ooh ooh complete control - lemme see your other hand!
I don't judge you.
So, why do you judge me?
Huh?
All over the news spread fast
They're dirty, they're filthy
They ain't gonna last!
This is Joe public speakin'
I'm controlled in the body, controlled in the mind
This is punk rockers,
we're controlled by the price of the hard drugs we must find
Freedom is control
Total
C-o-n control - that means you!
14 comments:
My disappointment in these aspects of the iPhone has been tempered somewhat by watching my friend struggle with her Norton antivirus software crashing her computer. The funny part is that it's the software that is supposed to prevent wasted time, crashes, and data loss that is causing the wasted time, crashes, and data loss.
I had a neighbor as a child who had a car that was in a perpetual state of disrepair. At first, he seemed cool because he knew how to fix all this stuff. At some point, though, I realized that the other side of the equation was that his car only worked half the time. He had fantasies of drag racing, but in practice, he never went drag racing and had to rely on friends, and his mom, for transportation.
I see Windows machines in the same light. I have fantasies that someday, I will have a racecar in the garage that I built from scratch, and a computer on my desk that uses all those great loopholes in the Windows operating system. This fantasy has rested unchanged in my psyche since the 1980's.
The other thing that has rested unchanged since the 1980's is that Windows machines are functionally broken from the time they come out of the box until the time you replace them. Just as it would be unacceptable to me if I had to spend an hour in the garage tuning my engine after each drive to the grocery store, I'm not interested in installing a new patch every time I check my email. The other analogy is the battered wife: here's you with your arm in a cast, telling me my husband is boring. Yep.
The iPhone gaps are annoying, but based on prior experience, I have every confidence that -gasp- Apple's engineers will actually fix it. Every machine has flaws and weaknesses, but for people who just want to use their computer without becoming programmers out of necessity instead if choice, Apple has had Windows beat for 30 years straight, because they find ways to make them work really well, including with third party software. I see no reason to think that this pattern will change with the iPhone.
I bet Ted Kacinsky was sitting in his mud-floor hut in rural Montana, thinking how free he was from the controls of the larger society. Technically, he would have been right. But hot showers were few and far between.
Ah Tom, you have two fatal flaws in your logic. First, to believe that the choice is only between Apple and Windows. That's exactly what Apple would like people to believe. There are also Linux machines, and open source options. That is the true avenue for empowerment.
Secondly, you equate a Luddite who actually rejected the new freedoms of advanced technology with an argument to give people the ability to do for themselves by encouraging them to dig into and understand how things work. You may remember bygone days of car parts strewn lawns but that's not the operative metaphor for the digital age.
Oh, and one more thing. Having helped two Mac friends install printers and figure out how to get up and going on the Internet, I'd have to say that the "ease of use" argument and the "perennially broken" PC argument are both cliche at this point. There are benefits and draw backs to both systems, and understanding how they work rather than blindly accepting Apple's wisdom will always put you in a better position. This post was meant as a criticism of Apple, not an ad for Microsoft.
I look at Apple and Windows, because they are the only two of which I am aware that have at least some degree of user-friendliness; that is, the user need not be a programmer. If there is a third option, I would love to hear of it.
If I am going to take the time to expand into a new field of technical expertise, I would probably choose studying import-export law. Programming is one route to greater personal empowerment, but people needn't choose between programming and helplessness. Or perhaps my point is that we shouldn't have to. I object to the degree to which people are forced to choose between being programmers and not using computers at all. Apples may require some expert help occasionally, same as I take my vehicle to a mechanic sometimes.
In that sense, it's a matter of priorities. The computer, for me, is a means to promoting non-computer goals. Of the available options, Apple has always given me the highest ratio of goal attainment to fumbling in the bowels of the computer. If I viewed any portion of the time I spend fixing the computer as "goal attainment," obviously the proportion would alter. What I object to is the degree to which fumbling with the computer is mandatory, not optional.
Maybe I've stumbled on the core of it: If I am not free to NOT fumble with the computer, then I am not more free. Yet people who criticize Apple always complain about every other aspect of what they aren't free to do. They never seem to notice that what Apple confers is the best available option to sit down and actually use the machine as intended. As a programmer, you perhaps view it as something intended to be programmed. That's like a steelworker viewing a car as something intended to be melted down. While that's true from that perspective, I would just like to drive it around for a while first before it breaks.
I completely agree that those who don't want to tinker should be free to use a service without having to hassle with its inner workings or be bogged down by its faults. My main point in the post is that forward thinking businesses will embrace open source systems that allow the more advanced user to not only customize their experience but also enhance the product. The company can review the changes and endorse those that make sense and don't break the product. I think they can serve both the basic and expert user equally.
As I think about it more, I do really like the more modular concept - put together what you want, leave out what you don't. The Internet works that way, for the most part. There's a set of generally-accepted standards, like HTML, that everyone can follow, but you don't have to have a specific browser or operating system. There are more complicated things as well, but you almost never have to learn them unless you choose to.
I'm not tech savvy enough to know why it's apparently impossible to build an actual computer that would work that way, with some kind of extremely basic operating system, and then you could load in whatever modules you wanted to, that would then interact as well as the Internet does. But, since there is no such machine, I guess it's not possible. Or is it?
In a way, reminiscent of that person we have all worked with that in order for us to perform our duties correctly, must share with us what it is that they do, and how they do it, but refuses to do so because their low self-esteem combined with paranoia tells them that were they to divulge said info, it would reduce their job security. What was that guy's name again...? Oh yeah, sounds like Macintosh. :P
Tom, I think you're actually describing a Linux system.
http://www.answers.com/topic/linux?cat=technology
Hi Dave,
I think that's a great analogy.
Hmm, analogies. How about an expensive security guard who keeps leaving the door open?
Not speaking of Mac, of course.
Aren't those Linux systems basically just an overlay that still suffers from all the flaws of the underlying machine? Or do they fully supplant the corporate operating system so that Windows security flaws can be effectively and permanently addressed? If the security flaws are actually addressed, I can't understand why more people aren't using them.
Unless there aren't enough user-friendly applications for Linux for it to be a functional consumer alternative. Then you're running (at least) two operating systems, and if either one has a major security flaw, you and your data are fucked.
Can Linux machines manipulate the same files that Windows and OSX can, eg Word documents, PDFs, jpegs, and surf the web? I would be interested in ditching the corporate operating system, but I can't help noticing that, even among people far more tech-savvy than me, Linux is a second vehicle, not the sole means of transportation.
What that tells me is that Linux is, in effect, an application for programmers that is in addition to Windows or Mac, not a fully functional substitute for the two operating systems that can be used to fully serve at least the needs of a non-programming consumer.
I would love to learn that I am wrong about that.
I'd say that for the most part you are wrong :). Linux is completely independent of Windows. It's a separate operating system, and there are a number of user-friendly apps that run on it. Why isn't it more widely used? For the most part because MS has muscled into exclusive agreements with hardware companies to get their software distributed. Linux is much more stable and secure than Windows, but for most people to use it, it involves installing the operating system on their computers after buying a windows machine, which is more effort than most want to deal with. That's changing, as there are now some hardware cos that sell Linux desktops and laptops.
Have you seen this new third-world laptop? It actually looks like it could do a lot of what I want to do. I don't suppose it'll handle docking to my iPhone, though. Still, for $200, I could see a lot of utility in it, even with some sacrifices. I was particularly intruiged by the criticism of all existing machines:
"Once in a program, though, the speed is fine; it turns out that a light processor is plenty if the software is written compactly and smartly. (O.L.P.C. points out that despite gigantic leaps in processing power, today’s business laptops don’t feel any faster than they did a few years ago. The operating systems and programs have added so much bloat that they absorb the speed gains.)"
Yes, I read about it a couple months back and have been following the story since. I think if you buy one they donate one to a developing country. It would make a great first laptop for kids anywhere.
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