Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Apple is the new dictator of my industry

I am distressed at the number of the IT professionals who are taking Apple's claims about the goal of the App Store's no-Flash or other such programming languages policy at face values. Apple's objective when refusing Flash has nothing to do with their stated position. Their concerns over quality or stability are not credible, when their action indicate that their goal with disallowing Flash is to reinforce their lock down on the platform. Indeed, Apple has already begun abusing the new-found benevolent dictator position:

Apple's PR department has been spinning their intent since the very moment of the release of the iPhone.

In the late '90s, Microsoft tried to use its monopoly position to crush the possibility that web application could become sufficiently feature-rich to compete with Windows. After years of fighting against that abuse of monopoly power, mainly through the funding of a huge effort to create the Firefox browser, today we enjoy thousands of rich and innovative web applications.

On the back of that success, we geeks are now handing a control of our computing to Apple. If one person buys an Apple products, no harm is done; if we all do, we instantiate an abusive monopoly, one that promises to be even more severely clutched than Microsoft's was.

I humbly suggest you considers boycotting Apple's products, and donating to an organization which fights monopoly abuse, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the Free Software Foundation.


No comments: