"I will use my operating system monopoly to put you out of business if you don't assist me in putting an unrelated competitor of ours out of business" is worse to you than "you may only use Objective C to develop on this device"?
What about this: "I will use my mobile operating system prestige to put your mobile company out of business if you don't assist me in putting a competitor of ours, Adobe, out of the mobile app business".
The word "monopoly" doesn't add much. People could develop for MacOS back then when Microsoft did that, but nobody used MacOS. Likewise, people can develop for Android now, but nobody uses android.
Sorry to be so presumptious but I don't think you've thought this through. Microsoft threatened to drive companies out of the computer industry. There are still plenty of other viable mobile platforms to develop for if the iPhone doesn't work out for you.
What I mean is that it is much more than "you may only use Objective C to develop on this device". You also haven't thought this through. It has many more long term implications than the language choice.
And we have a disagreement about what viable mobile platform means.
There isn't much of a mobile games market outside the iPhone. Unless you want to develop children games for the DS. And then you would need to wear a suit to sign a contract with Nintendo. And guess what, they don't sign more than X contracts a year, where X is a very low number. So you could be out of luck.
The point is that if the iPhone is the most lucrative platform now, it is not in the best interest of the developer to put their eggs in only one basket. And markets change. So they should create demand in parallel in other devices too.
But to port to other devices takes time and money, two scarce resources, as you now.
One way they could be less dependent on the iPhone with minimum investment is to use a compatibility layer like Unity. Unity already works on the Wii, and will work on the Android and Xbox soon, with windows phone probably not far away. But with the new rules, that is not a solution anymore.
Also, it is ironic that Unity will work on Xbox but not on the iPhone. Don't you think?
When the iPhone has 70% of the market, instead of the ~25% it apparently has now, your argument will make sense to me. Until then, you seem to think that Apple has additional responsibilities to the market simply because they're the best current platform. Being the best doesn't mean that.
I would guess they have 95% of the 3D mobile games market now.
And I didn't say they have additional responsibilities to the market at all. I was just making the case that to limit choice of your partners (and, therefore, your consumers) to kill your competitors is evil. It is what Microsoft did with OEMs and it is what Apple is doing with developers.
Is is perfectly possible to kill a competitor without being evil. The best example is Facebook. I don't think Facebook would ban a developer for using a Google API or a compatibility layer that make games work in Myspace too. They even allow multiple payment platforms!
No, they just prevented them from shipping software by default. No OEM was going to say, you know what, Netscape is more important to me than being in business. That's just a business deal. But as a user you could always just install it yourself. It was all about market share, there was no actual limitations on the device. This is about materially impacting WHAT YOU CAN DO ON THE DEVICE, as both a user (certain apps unavailable, this will make it worse) and as a developer. Microsoft never did anything like that on the scale Apple is doing now.
What Microsoft did was in fact so much worse than what Apple is doing that the DOJ sued them for it and won.
I think the reason for the vitriol on this particular issue is that Apple is doing something that computer geeks don't think is correct, and computer geeks can't handle it when people do things "wrong".
Your first statement can't be judged yet. If all Microsoft had ever done was the IE thing, they wouldn't have sued. They had a pattern of anti-competitive behavior and that was the most egregious and well documented example so the DOJ went with it. Apple over the last few years has been fairly anti-competitive, this won't push it over the edge but it is another straw on the camel's back. So lets look back in 10 years and see what happened.
And the 2nd statement could be applied to the whole Opera sueing MS over browsers in the EU recently, or even the IE/Netscape thing back in the day.
Honestly I think it is more people don't like being told they have to waste time and money giving up projects/products they started and learning the tools Apple is arbitrarily forcing them to use. That is money out of people's pocket and you will find that pisses people off a lot more than anything else.
Acting anticompetitively to support a monopoly is what is against the law.
If the DOJ is up on Apple in 10 years, it'll be because their policies from today are so successful that they come to absolutely dominate the market. In which case, it would have been practically actionable for them not to have served their shareholders by pursuing those policies.
EDIT: whoa! I have been downvotted after asking if it is safe for children.
So, here are some references.
"Children have much thinner skull bones and their brains have a lot more fluid, so their brain tissues would likely absorb twice more radiation compared to an adult’s brain. But cellphone radiation standards set by the government remains the same for both groups."
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/tag/radiation/
"If the notebook is sitting on a child’s lap, that child is exposed to radio emissions comparable to that of a mobile phone. If the notebook is 20 cm away, the child is subjected to exposure of just 1% to that of a mobile phone"
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/04/29/warning-keep...
Children are going to take your mobile phone, put their head near the microwave, suck antennas of your wifi router and do lots and lots of crazy things that will expose them to different kinds of radiation. (while you're not looking / least expecting of course) Can anyone really protect children from EM waves of various nature these days? There are probably more dangerous items in your environment than an iPad.
Wikimedia is not only a non-profit, but also Google's more sucessful competitor in organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful, albeit with some factual errors and unsourced statements.
Google benefits from Wikipedia articles in that they make Google more useful, but if Wikipedia is always the first result, people will begin to go directly to Wikipedia to get information, just like they go directly to Facebook or to Twitter, even though Google also benefits from their public information.
I doubt it. All people I know use Google as their URL entry field, as the concept of URL is too machine-oriented to be comfortably used by the average guy, when good search is available. Given that, Google donating to Wikipedia is a pure win-win situation.
People don't need to type the url. Wikipedia is already installed as a search engine on Firefox's search box (and maybe in IE?). Eventually users will learn to use it.
Crome's omnibox search also takes users to wikipedia without visiting google. They could show ads in the omnibox, but the space and user experience is more limited.
And don't forget that most sites don't get all their referrers from Google, so users are getting there via another way. Some of those are indeed direct traffic, without an intermediary.
I still usually type what I want into google followed by wiki to get the relevant Wikipedia entry first.
Google is also better at finding the page you want that Wikipedia itself, such as if you type in The Simpsons wiki, but you really want the episode list page, it will be the second result indented under the main page.
It may not really save to much time, but if a tech guy like myself does it that way, average internet users would probably be even more inclined to.
"We've heard from lots of developers over the past two years who are excited to build on top of Kindle"
So, why didn't they do nothing for two years?
One week before Apple supposedly will announce the iTablet, Amazon creates a press release saying a limited beta of the Kindle SDK will start next month!
If you are the market leader, why would you wait two years for yours competitors? Doesn't make sense to me.
It seems to me that Amazon likes to do things really thoroughly. They start out by specialising in one thing (selling books) and use the infrastructure to diversify (selling consumer products) and the expertise gained to make new products (AWS). I'm really excited about this, if only to see outspoken Jobs, who rubbishes competition quite easily, pitched against old school Bezos, who refuses to even talk about the competition.
If I remember correctly from a visit out there a couple of months ago, they top out at around 12 people on a team (as the other reply mentioned, they're internally referred to as "2-pizza" teams).
"...Google looked... the way they were being sold (exclusive to specific carriers, and used to lock consumers in, just like all prior phones) and felt that it just wasn't doing the job the way they'd planned. Android had a reason for existing, and it was to break the logjam in the mobile industry".
If that was their intention, they failed at it. The Nexus One costs about the same as the iPhone to produce, yet the unlocked version is sold by the the same price that what an unlocked iPhone would be. That means their are getting Apple like obscene margins.
No non-technical user in his sane mind would pay $330 more for an unlocked phone.
What they must do, if it is not obvious enough, is to get Amazon like margins and monetize the rest with a wave of new consumers hungry to look at ads.
The Nexus One costs about the same as the iPhone to produce, yet the unlocked version is sold by the the same price that what an unlocked iPhone would be.
You can't buy an unlocked iPhone from Apple in the US. You can buy a contract-free iPhone for $600, which is more than the Nexus One and still locked to AT&T. Yes you may be able to unlock the iPhone yourself, but that gets you in a constant cat-and-mouse game with Apple who considers you a criminal at that point.
No non-technical user in his sane mind would pay $330 more for an unlocked phone.
T-Mobile's plans are $20/month cheaper if you're not paying off a subsidized phone, so you'll more than recoup the cost difference of the unsubsidized N1 over two years.
The Nexus One costs about the same as the iPhone to produce, yet the unlocked version is sold by the the same price that what an unlocked iPhone would be. That means their are getting Apple like obscene margins.
The point: You missed it.
The Nexus One is officially unlocked, and usable on just about any carrier. The carriers are the problem here, and breaking the hold they have over consumers in order to allow competition on price and quality is the goal. The Nexus One isn't magic. It doesn't fix the carriers; but it is one more thing to allow consumers to escape without having to break the EULA, hack their phone, possibly bricking it, etc. Apple is the enemy of this idea, not a friend, and the iPhone is among the best servants the old guard (well, the oldest guard, AT&T, anyway) has in their fight to maintain a stranglehold over consumers communications.
"Americans let the Patriot Act be passed into law, not Google. Stop blaming Google and start blaming your democratically elected government"
Just like Google is putting their lobbyists where their interests are in cases where government intervention (or lack of it) is hurting their business (net neutrality, open mobile applications, visas, wireless spectrum, etc), they should also fight against the Patriot Act.
If people don't feel comfortable using Google's products due to fear of government spying, they will restrict their search, clean their cookies, block adsense/analytics, etc, all of which will impact Google financially.
But as the Freebsd security head, what do you do to understand a large code base you probably aren't familiar with and its security implications?
I ask someone to explain it to me.
Being FreeBSD Security Officer, I have an uncommon luxury: I have about 200 highly qualified developers available who will stop what they're doing and help me out if I say "so, umm, I sort of need to understand how this code works...".
..until a big company acquires this new startup and kills their product again.
This is one more problem with the cloud computing era.
In the 90's, you could continue to use a product even after it was discontinued. I remember reading that Steve Wozniack is still an Eudora mail user. The last time I heard about Eudora was maybe 15 years ago. You can't say the same about the last startup product.
What about this: "I will use my mobile operating system prestige to put your mobile company out of business if you don't assist me in putting a competitor of ours, Adobe, out of the mobile app business".
The word "monopoly" doesn't add much. People could develop for MacOS back then when Microsoft did that, but nobody used MacOS. Likewise, people can develop for Android now, but nobody uses android.