I think this paragraph really hits the nail on the head:
Apple has built a little slab of Disneyland with its iPad, which is meant to be an experience unsullied by provocative or crude material. It’s beautiful and enticing-- the company has already sold more than a half million of them in the first two weeks it’s been available-- but it’s not the real world.
Disneyland is the perfect metaphor for the iPhone/iPad experience. It's a closed theme-park, which exercises tight control over what products and services it offers its patrons. It's not an open market, and is not intended to be.
I'm hoping that once people get this, the moral outrage (and all of the articles about the moral outrage) will die down.
Applications that are in violation of the TOS are going to be rejected by the App Store. That means they have to be written in the language that Apple specifies, and meeting the content standards that Apple specifies. If there's content that in "Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable", you're out of luck.
And, of course, it's well within Apple's rights to keep the leash so tight, just as Disney can tightly control which goods and services are offered within the confines of their theme parks. It's not anywhere near a monopoly situation, and there are plenty of opportunities outside the park walls for developers to make and sell whatever they like.
Applications that are in violation of the TOS are going to be rejected by the App Store.
As well as applications that are in violation of some future version of the TOS. Or compete against some future Apple product. Or that fail to meet an unknown arbitrary standard. The thing is, Apple is asking developers to invest in their product, and continuously changing the rules. Publishing for Apple products is becoming too risky.
I decided not to transition my sales force to iPad's because vendors like Appcelerator will almost certainly drop iPad support if the TOS changes. Developing glue code in Objective-C is like buying a supercomputer to play Solitaire. You can do it, but it's overkill, and that doesn't make it a good idea. We'll wait for the HP Slate or an Android tablet.
And yet, people love Disneyland. I'm not trying to defend Apple here, but the majority of the public just doesn't care about "freedom" (in terms of things you can do with the device) if you give them a good experience.
But no one wants to live in Disneyland. A manufactured experience can be nice for a while - it certainly achieves a level of perfection that other experiences cannot. But in the end, a walled garden only extends as far as the walls. And there's a whole world out there that's messy and dangerous and not as polished, but also more exciting, more fulfilling, more real.
Apple has built a little slab of Disneyland with its iPad, which is meant to be an experience unsullied by provocative or crude material. It’s beautiful and enticing-- the company has already sold more than a half million of them in the first two weeks it’s been available-- but it’s not the real world.
Disneyland is the perfect metaphor for the iPhone/iPad experience. It's a closed theme-park, which exercises tight control over what products and services it offers its patrons. It's not an open market, and is not intended to be.
I'm hoping that once people get this, the moral outrage (and all of the articles about the moral outrage) will die down.
Applications that are in violation of the TOS are going to be rejected by the App Store. That means they have to be written in the language that Apple specifies, and meeting the content standards that Apple specifies. If there's content that in "Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable", you're out of luck.
And, of course, it's well within Apple's rights to keep the leash so tight, just as Disney can tightly control which goods and services are offered within the confines of their theme parks. It's not anywhere near a monopoly situation, and there are plenty of opportunities outside the park walls for developers to make and sell whatever they like.