I replied to John Battelle’s question “Is Apple’s iWorld the Web”
If everyone at FOOcamp managed to mix up the AppStore and Apple’s congtibution to the open web so badly, it has me questioning who are these smart, eclectic people and who pays their salaries.
I am an ‘Apple person’. I have drunk of Windows (in about 8 flavours), Solaris, HP-UX, Ultrix, IRIX, Linux and BSD (and about a dozen of their popular WMs) and time and time again the only solutions which slake my thirst for both power and experience are ‘Designed in California by Apple’. This happened with the Mac, with Newton, with Mac OS X and most lately with iOS.
Be very clear, John, iOS is most definitely the best way to experience mobile and, with the iPad, I am committed to the hype that it is the best way to experience the web as a whole.
What your peers at FOOcamp seem to be conflating is the development and hosting platform (which will forever remain the domain of Mac, Windows, Linux etc) and the consumption platform. The needs of a developer cannot be met by these lovely lustworthy devices which pave the way for the industry to copy. But equally, we cannot forever expect our tech-illiterate cousins and grandparents to forever maintain a machine capable of advanced software development and multiple-core computation when they only want to surf the web for last minute holiday deals and funny pictures of turtles.
What I find most startling hover is how much power and credit you have given Apple. There are billions of devices out there. About a billion iPods and 100 million iOS devices. This is a tiny percentage of the market at large yet the media and your smart and eclectic peers waste so much breath on the underdog – and Apple still is the underdog – with so much unreasoning hatred.
You are giving Apple mindshare and heartshare where it lacks marketshare.
Sent from my iPad off the coast of Algiers (037.3127N, 002.4932E)
