| Monday, August 10, 2009 |
06:17 - What about our unreasonable demands?!
http://www.marco.org/159321665
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Boy, it's been a while since I've seen a nice crunchy fisking of a good old-fashioned unhinged Apple rant. This one by Marco Arment (via DF) will do quite nicely.
But that’s OK, reality doesn’t seem to apply to this article. His first main point is that Apple should open iTunes to media players from other manufacturers:
Another radical visionary, Steve Gillmor, has been hosting this discussion since Apple’s draconian iTunes updates led smart people to downgrade their software. Think about that mind bomb for a second: people downgrading their software to maintain their freedoms—is this a William Gibson novel?
Where are all of these “smart people” who are downgrading iTunes to maintain their freedoms? And which freedoms? The freedom to break Apple’s DRM? The freedom for Palm to violate the USB spec by identifying the Pre with a different vendor ID?
I didn't exactly have to read much farther than this to realize what we're up against here: one of those "infinite choice equals infinite happiness" people who have taken a concept that works admirably in the world of commodity products like dish detergent and soft drinks and applied it kicking and screaming to the world of software ecosystems. It's people like him we have to thank for the user-interface joys that are GNOME and KDE, and the playground of unfettered competition that thrives like a bacterial colony in one's typical Windows Registry.
On Planet Calacanis, as Arment describes it, it would be a better world if Apple were to "open" its products and release its monopolistic stranglehold on the product interaction chain. If they were to make iTunes play with other, non-iPod music players. If the iPhone would work on other (even multiple simultaneous!) networks. I don't think the piece states this explicitly, but it wouldn't surprise me if Calacanis also demands for Apple to license OS X for generic PC hardware, the favorite hobby-horse of those people who love to illustrate how often it is that the smallest part of the potential market—the part that would represent the least possible gain while costing the greatest possible compromise in product unity and vision—is invariably the loudest.
It's all sealed when the word "over-priced" crosses the screen. God, I haven't seen that one in years. I'd thought everyone had figured out by now what a bargain the iPod is. Not to understand that requires never having used any other MP3 players, or indeed examined the prices on any similarly-spec'd devices from companies such as Microsoft. People like Calacanis can't imagine how such a monolithic market as Apple's can have come into existence because of customer demand for it, not in spite of it; and so his assumption is that the market is now held captive by a not-so-benevolent dictator who is now ruthlessly jacking up prices now that nobody has any choice but to bow down. So the reality—that the prices of iPods have not materially changed since 2001, and indeed have decreased pretty dramatically considering the diversity of the product line nowadays; not to mention that the death of all the competition owes to the competition's crappy product and service offerings more than to any perceived but false value in Apple's or unfair lock-in to an inescapable black hole of an ecosystem—simply doesn't register. How do you suppose it is that Apple has managed to attain such an enviable position of power this decade without backing down from its premium price model that had so doomed it back in the 90s when the cheapo PC market was eating its lunch? It's not because of the inherent fallacy of the model, that's for sure; it just took the market a while to mature into it. Certainly Apple—even without Steve—sure looks like it knew what it was doing all along.
Once you've seen the word "over-priced", you're pretty sure you're dealing with a crank; and once he drops the bombshell that his shining vision of utopia is Akihabara, you know for certain. Yeah: that's what we all want, clearly. The reason the iPhone has succeeded so spectacularly is because it saved us from the morass of anonymous, interchangeable, price-depressed, feature-laden, godawful-UI gadgets that we waded through daily, grasping for BlackBerrys and Palms at the top end of the market because it was the only way to keep above the tidal wave. Japan's theme-park atmosphere and bewildering market of insane feature lists and razor-thin margins would have just been so much the worse. The reason people love the iPhone is that it finally makes sense of that hideous dreamscape, shuts out the clamor and the flashing lights and lets you just put it all in a nice smooth box, letting in just the features you need on your own terms. Hell, it's the reason I finally broke down and got one. It's so unlike a "cell phone" that it let me rethink the whole concept. For that I'm willing to pay for what amounts to another iPod. And so, from the look of things, are a whole lot of other people, who would just as soon not live in Neo-Tokyo.
These "information wants to be free, and so does the hardware it runs on" people are amusing as hell sometimes; one really does wonder what planet they could be living on that makes them so unhappy with the state of things today, so measurably better than they could otherwise be, and bringing such satisfaction to such large swaths of the market, while they stand outside the perimeter, sulking and prowling around looking for reasons to tell us all we're not as happy as we think we are.
But then, I think it's simple enough to tell what's going on, as soon as you see the picture at the top of Calacanis' treatise: the old 1984 ad girl, so recently repurposed by Apple itself with a CG-retrofitted iPod.
Ho ho, how clever. Apple's been turned against itself! How droll! Because, you see, now Steve Jobs is Big Brother. What delicious irony! Surely it takes a big man to take such daring advantage of such a journalistic opportunity; but sometimes, to paraphrase Jack Handey, it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.
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Brian Tiemann
