[clug] Android in the Business Press

[Hal]

On 05/14/2010 10:58 AM, Alex Satrapa wrote:
> classic quote: "Che Guavera t-shirts worn by middle class teenage 
> rebels that Che would have shot in an instant"). Not only are iPhone 
> users more likely to spend money on stuff, they're also (sadly) more 
> likely to be gormless trend-followers.
Che was a middle class rebel who liked killing and f**king and found 
that ideology, (whatever else it was or wasn't), was really useful to 
let him do rather a lot of it. He took particular pleasure in killing 
unarmed prisoners without trial on whim, pulling the trigger himself.
So I'm gonna write me an iphone-Che app because he's pretty and make my 
fortune ;)
Shame you need a mac & OSX to do that. Iphone & Ipad are the most closed 
general purpose, software eco-systems ever (games consoles might be 
worse). They make Microsoft look like the FSF in comparison. You must 
pay apple before you can start, you must pay apple to make your 
application available to others, you must pay apple, what is it? 30% of 
your *revenue* (makes govt. tax look cheap in comparsion) and apple can 
destroy you for any reason (including reasons that should be stopped by 
the ACCC) at any time or indeed, no reason at all. And they do this 
arbitrarily and regularly. It's software and business, not murder so 
saying it's like Che is silly. However, "There's an apple-tax for that."
Bill Gates and Steve Balmer are saints with halos compared to apple 
policies. The only thing that saves us from apple's evil intent is their 
low market share.

I find RMS too extreme for my tastes but he does have the courage of his 
convictions and you can see where he gets it from. Having worked in a 
glass tower on the chain gang using only rubbish tools from redmond I 
can't fix I look at it and see s/microsoft/apple/gi and just replacing 
one set of symptoms with another and no guarantee of any real analgesic 
at all.

Open platforms with competition among applications is the only way 
forward. And I'd pay extra for the assurance from apple, microsoft, 
google, steam, KPMG or anyone else that this app I bought from their 
store rather than the existing alternatives, is not malware, but only if 
their assurance was worth it and the assurance service can only be worth 
it if it's competitive. The biggest winners from the arrival of firefox 
are IE users by a big margin.

The Nokia N900 is a lovely, lovely phone and a lot of hardware for 
A$650. I love mine. The SDK is free. I'm sure an iphone doesn't do the 
things I want as well as the N900. If only it could get the market share 
to make it a useful target for commerical devs as well as people like 
us. I suppose Android has a shot.