| Home > News and Views > Dave Winer says Apple owns my ass with its siloing of data. No, Dave, cut out the FUD and get some lessons in clear thinking. |
| Dave Winer says Apple owns my ass with its siloing of data. No, Dave, cut out the FUD and get some lessons in clear thinking. | | Date Created: 05 May, 2006, 12:14 AM |
 Every so often, when I visit the stats for this blog to see how people find it, I get to re-read a blog entry plus any comments that accrue.
One of the more popular entries remains the one where I gently explain to uber-blogger and scripter Dave Winer how to use Apple's iTunes, which he aggressively dissed in a Scripting News entry of his own.
That entry was picked up far and wide, and the length of my rebuttal was even taken as evidence of how hard iTunes is to understand by one "esteemed" member of the fourth estate.
My own rebuttal was to challenge him and Winer to locate a multiplatform free application which possessed all the capabilites of iTunes - and I listed 19 functions of iTunes which would require several apps. to emulate.
Dave never replied or acknowledged that entry, and that's his business.
He's continued to use his iPod and Macs, and now that Apple has released new aggressive ads. which I blogged about a day ago, he has continued his love/hate relationship with Apple.
I think anyone who is in the top 100 Technorati blogs who over-reaches in their criticism of Apple requires a close inspection of their claims. You only get a high ranking if you have sufficient eyeballs reading your blog (via others linking to you), and thus you are a blogger of influence. That interests me, and so another rebuttal to Dave's claims are in order.
In case you didn't go to his Scripting News site, here's a summary quote of his criticisms:
"And that's another thing not to like about Apple. They're always making you feel stupid for having bought their latest and greatest. I'd like to see Microsoft fire back with ads of their own about Apple's planned obsolescence and how much it costs, really, to keep up with them. You have to be rich to love Apple. PCs, even if the OS and apps are butt-ugly, and the viruses are just awful, are computers lots of people can afford, people who couldn't afford Macs. And dollar for dollar, Windows machines perform better than Macs."
And in a separate entry:
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 "Another one -- the apps Apple bundles are marvels of lock-in. Try to get your data out of them. No no, says Uncle Steve. We own your ass. Or at least your data."
That link, by the way, will take you to a photo of a silo (right) another term used to describe being locked in.
Let's start with this last bon-mot, that "Apple owns your ass."
I don't know about other Apple users, but if Apple were to string together a bunch of lousy apps running on lousy equipment, I'm outta here. The fact that it hasn't, and I continue to write about Apple (without telling friends or others to buy a Mac any longer) means that the product mix - the whole widget approach - works for me, and a growing number of switchers.
Now Dave wants to export his data out of his Apple-platform apps. The ones that come with the Mac which serves as the basis for the parody in the new Apple ads. The ones that poke fun at the long list (!) of Windows apps which come bundled with Windows.
In which case we're referring to the iLife apps., as well as Address Book, iCal, Mail, iChat, Textedit, Stickies etc. These are the bundled apps. into which you can enter your data.
Add iWork '06 too if you want. Leave out MS Office. It's irrelevant to the argument as it's cross-platform.
Let's look at the bundled iLife suite into which you can bring your data, either via the keyboard, a peripheral like a camera (video or still) or a scanner, the web, or say a Quicktime movie from a DVD or VCD.
iLife consists of a number of media-producing apps. By definition, their task is to convert your raw data into something useful.
iMovie for example takes the raw DV stream (which it leaves in original form on your camera's tape or DVD), and let's you manipulate before exporting it. You can create a Quicktime movie in a variety of file sizes and various codecs, exporting as an mp4 (in two modes), a .mov file such as H.263, as well as one ready to stream where you have the ability to select the expected download speed - broadband or dial-up. Or you can export your movie into iDVD where it then becomes a DVD which you can play on a Windows or Mac computer or a stand alone DVD player.
Perhaps you like old media and are little old-fashioned? Use a Canopus digital converter and export it to a VHS recorder, if you must. Or use Toast to export to a VCD if you're in Asia or the Middle East where these media remain popular.
Hardly silo material.
What else?
Garageband? Export to iTunes, where you have several modes you can export to, including mp3, mp4 and m4v. They can be shared around.
iPhoto? Import your jpegs from your camera, manipulate them and export as jpegs, TIFFS, or png files. Doesn't look closed to me.
iWeb? Export as a web page, blog, podcast, photocast... nope, that's open too.
What about the iWork package?
Well, Keynote exports as Powerpoint, PDF, Quicktime, png, Flash, iDVD, and html.
Pages - well, less one or two formats but still: PDF, MS Word, hmtl, RTF, and plain text.
So, am I missing something, Dave? Remind me again, how is my data owned by "Uncle Steve"? I use the Mac because it can take my raw data and help me do things with it I couldn't do otherwise, and then lets me share it in a variety of formats for others to see and hear. On the web, on DVD/CD, via a data projector, on a thumbdrive, on an iPod or other mp3 player, and on paper. |
 Dave writes:
"They're always making you feel stupid for having bought their latest and greatest. I'd like to see Microsoft fire back with ads of their own about Apple's planned obsolescence and how much it costs, really, to keep up with them."
Huh? What to someone is "planned obsolescence" is someone else's continuing innovation. What do you want Apple to do, Dave? Stay still and keep promising vapourware so you can stay current with your hardware or software?
Or keep delaying Vista for another year so your installation of Windows Xp (with how many security updates each week or month so far?) also stays current. Someone making you feel stupid is the sort of thinking usually associated with high school and adolescence. That kind of cognitive style doesn't wash around here, Dave.
How many Powerpoints have there been since first introduced in 1987 (for the Mac) and 1990 for Windows? And are they compatible with each other, even the ones developed in the past five years? Talk about planned obsolescence.
Got news for you Dave. Windows Xp does the job for the vast majority of its users. But compared to OS X, it's obsolete. And so is Office for that matter. Go talk to your mate, Steve Gillmor about the future of Office. He hasn't exactly been quiet about its imminent demise.
By the way, who says you have to keep up with Apple, Dave? That you must have the latest and greatest? That's your choice - and if you want to feel stupid, that's also your choice. Although I have to say there must have been a few with buyer's remorse after Apple introduced the Intel iMac so soon after the G5 iMac. Adam Curry got over it, even though I told him to take it back and get an exchange. He accepted this is how life can be sometimes. Tell me the last time someone got excited about the latest Dell laptop. No one cares, Dave. It's just another PC.
What other "keeping up" is there, Dave? Software. The OS X updates have now increased to 18 month intervals, and these point updates are really quite significant with each release speeding up operations, rather than slowing them down. (Sooner or later, Apple will switch to an OS which operates only on Intel Mac, but I reckon that's a few years away).
The iLife pack updates annually, as does iWork, but again the updates are your choice and represent significant improvements, avoiding the bloatware increases in "features" so often seen in Windows software. |
By the way, older macs generally speed up with each point increase in OS X.
And now we come to this exemplary piece of twisted logic:
"You have to be rich to love Apple."
No, Dave. Prudent, resourceful, desirous of wanting the product that best delivers to you an ability to be creative. You love Apple because it gets out of the way and lets you do your work when you want, it allows you to form an emotional relationship with both the hardware and the software because it was designed with the end user in mind, not because a software engineering team thought it was "good enough" to ship.
Apple wants to delight its users; when was the last time a Microsoft software product did that? Go read some of Don Norman's work (previous Apple fellow and now MS consultant as well as half of the NeilsonNorman design consultancy) to better undertand our emotional relationship with products. As he has said, "Design pretty".
Or as Steve Jobs once said about Microsoft, "... they have no taste."
You also say:
"PCs, even if the OS and apps are butt-ugly, and the viruses are just awful, are computers lots of people can afford...."
So how are people to have a positive relationship with this kind of product? I wouldn't know how.... Affordability might attract you to a product, but once you start to use it and live with it, the principle words and feelings that come to mind I keep hearing are disappointment, frustration, jealousy and hatred.
And you continue: "... people who couldn't afford Macs. And dollar for dollar, Windows machines perform better than Macs."
I have no idea what this means. Faster? Better finished product? More user satisfaction? More likely the end product will get the tender or win the contract for the end user?
You and I both know there is no money to be made in this lower end market and Apple won't go play down there. Nor will you, I bet. Stop acting like a white knight for all those who you think can't afford a Mac, and start encouraging people to look at total cost of ownership as well as satisfaction and enjoyment of using a computer, then do the math again.
You're doing no one any favours by standing up for the little guy with false comparisons and your own version of FUD. |
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