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Now is the operative word. Apple in general is playing dirty across the boards and people are starting to notice this and pull out. Apple pissed off adobe and now they don't have flash on devices that SHOULD run it. Apple pissed off Amazon by demanding an ungodly 30% of book costs for the amazon iOS app and now Amazon has made a work around. Apple if they hope to expand their marketshare (which is only 16%, half of what anrdoid has and slightly above RIM) needs to keep a working relationship with developers. You piss off developers, you pissed off the hard that feeds you. Look at the console wars as a reference. How many consoles died because they didn't have enough games? There were some really damn good consoles that died well before they should have because developers didn't want to port to their way of thinking. Apple is doing the same thing. When you couple their negative attitude toward the people on their side, their constant stream of I sue you, you sue me politics, and their lack of innovation in the last 3 builds of the iPhone, it's a very bleak outlook for the supposed frontrunner in smartphone technologies. Apple needs to reform their strategy into a two part approach. The first approach is similar to the one they have now, just more developer friendly. The second is similar to what IBM is doing, living off patent licenses and using them to subsidize Apple's R&D. The analogy I could make to what apple is currently doing is like me taking Meth to get through grad school. Without sleep I could probably study twice as much, pull amazing grades, and make some major noise. Eventually that runs out. I will kill myself in the process. If apple sours both its competitors and its contributors the two will band together in spite of apple.
Yup, developers is what makes a platform go round. Would I port any of my stuff to iPhone? No. Plus, they'd probably get rejected anyways. Sure, maybe I can do something in the Cydia store, but I just don't feel comfortable doing that. Believe it or not, I used to own an iPhone and yes I can agree that they have hardly made any innovations in the last few releases. Most high end Android phones have some pretty nifty stuff. Fingerprint scanners, HDMI ports, DLNA support, I mean ****, I've been able to run BACKTRACK and UBUNTU on an Android. Most importantly, 4G support (HSPA+, LTE, WIMAX)
Points taken, but I guess we'd have to go back to the old "are we talking prevalence of the OS, or prevalence of a company selling phones, much the same way it was when we had to discuss "Yes, there are more PC's with windows, but they aren't all sold by the same company" and "are we talking hardware or software. anyway, somewhat off topic, sorry. My point was they are not in the same position in regard to PC's as they are with their phones. The windows thing wasn't exactly a "loss" since they've consistently increased market share of PC's sold when many are losing market share, and that if they "lose" The smart phone fight, it is somewhat debatable if the 'in house' issue was the main cause at all. I would say it would be more sentiment like Pizza's that would cause it, right or wrong (a little of both, in my opinion, but perception is everything) as well as their ability to continue to innovate in that market/industry. If you take into account the web of products they make that function together somewhat seamlessly, you could say that taking "in house" to a new multi tier level is a big part of their success.
I've actually owned all the iPhones myself and I recently made the switch to WP7. The fact that you and I have voice nav for free, and iPhone users have to pay through the nose for it laughable. Plus, how do you program for an OS without object oriented code? Sure, iOS does object C, but that's painful when you compare it to VB on WP7. I haven't messed with Android at all, but from what I hear its a breeze...
Yup, it sure is a breeze on Android. Eclipse sucks but it comes in handy, and I keep a couple of devices to test amongst fragmentation. I've been thinking of maybe starting to do something for WP7 but I don't have a WP7 phone heh.
I don't know if the suit will succeed, but they should be taken to task on this at least more so in the court of public opinion if nothing else.
Why? I didn't read it all with a fine tooth comb, but this sounds like it's publisher driven as much as anything. Because the publishers are really the one's getting squeezed out here. Yes, Apple will also make less money, but it's the publishers who will ultimately be forced to lower their wholesale prices.
I'm pretty sure they got with those publishers that were only on amazon before and told them that they could sell their books to the iUser market through their store but to do so they would have to raise their prices, if I'm not mistaken, they made them agree to raise them everywhere if they wanted in. In my opinion, ebooks are too expensive, and this was egregious, but I didn't go over with a finetoothed comb either, just what I recall. What can I say, I shoot from the hip.
