Will Shripley the creator of Delicious Library made a great post on his blog on how Apple is following Sony’s footsteps in loosing the number one spot in music player due to greed and stupidity. It is a long but very good read. I completely agree with what he says. Apple must play nice with developers and cease the ridiculous paths it is starting to take. They are opting for closed platforms in the iPhone, iPod touch and Apple TV, when they should be writing frameworks for developers to create apps just like for the Mac. Right now there are rouge SDKs that have been written for the iPhone and Apple TV, thus proving that people do want to customize their Apple “closed” devices.
Some of the suggestions Will makes:
What should Steve do? Well, for starters, give up on trying to control everything. It’s only going to keep hurting Apple, more and more, to control content and hardware and software. It’s going to make them into the kind of mega-monopoly that we always, ALWAYS end up hating. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. 100% of the time.
Second, Apple should announce that it’s going to write frameworks so third parties can write applications for iPods and iPhones. No, it won’t be easy. But, seriously, there’s no excuse. I mean, with the iPhone they could hide behind AT&T wanting assurances people won’t use their phones off-network, or behind consumers wanting their iPhones to never crash. Which are both reasonable points, I admit. And, for the record, I’ve never written a line of code for the iPhone, although one of my employees has (in his spare time). I don’t like to screw with undocumented APIs, life’s too short.
Apple: stop getting greedy and start opening up!!!
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