Why dictators tempt more than penguins

The open nature of the PC wasn’t inherently what brought it greater success. The open nature of the PC meant that it could spawn an ecosystem of third party hardware vendors, sure. It also meant that it could be cheaply cloned by other manufacturers, ensuring competition that drove down the price of hardware. The net result? x86 is ubiquitous, sufficiently so that even Apple use a basically standard x86 platform these days. Low prices and the wide availability of software that people wanted to run bought the PC the marketplace, with Microsoft being the real winners. Apple hardware remained more expensive for years, and the compelling MacOS software was mostly limited to areas like DTP. Nobody else had any incentive to buy a Mac.

Now, let’s look at the phone market. Third party hardware vendors? No real distinction between the iphone and anything else. Sure, anything remotely clever has to plug into the dock port, but developing something to work with that also gets you into the ludicrously huge ipod market. Other phone accessories are either batteries, chargers or headphones. That’s really not going to be what determines market success. (Source)

And then he writes about Symbian and Windows Mobile handsets, say negative words and I’m saying to myself that “it’s just another one of these open source idealist that bash any closed source app they see”. But it’s 7:10am and I’m already late for work so I flag the post and ran away. A few hours later, sugar in my coffee give me enough energy to make me able to actually read the post, and worse, to even agree with most of it.

On one hand because eye candy count: especially on appliances, but also on computers. Not only the iPhone UI make the device easy and pleasant to use; but it also masks some of its flaws.

On the other hand, as much I am willing to curse anybody that badmouth shareware, (a very good model that pushed everywhere computers to everybody) as an owner of both a Windows Mobile phone and another low-end, “only java” phone, I had to search for software for these platforms, a task that brings back awful and degrading memories. (Even if in the end, I found what I searched)

The world is (mostly) isn’t fair. Users don’t care about developers. Worse, any user that I know that is able to make difference between freeware (Windows Gallery) and Open Source (F-Spot) is also developer.

Apple proved a thing: users don’t care about paying a buck to get Sudoku on their phone if:

• The process is simple. It’s a phone, it’s a Sudoku game, and I don’t want to check compatibility lists.
• The process is sure: both in the meaning that there won’t be fraud during billing and that the game will enforce certain quality requirements.

If Apple making sure that the apps won’t break the phone is a good idea, as a developer, Apple saying that “you can’t do better than Apple and so you shouldn’t try”, or banishing whole software categories (Interpreters, VMs, turn by turn navigation, VoIP, podcast downloader…) leaves competitors some “attack surface” to get (or conserve) market share.

The “jailbreak community”, (people hacking their Apple hardware to allow third party software) uses repositories to sort and qualify software. Same kind of repositories as Debian uses: there is the safe one, the one for more advanced users, the one with beta software and so on. For Android (or OpenMoko, or Symbian or Windows Mobile, or Java…) to catch up, getting repositories that are fully and extensively sorted and that only contain the most valuable and usable apps could be a step in the right direction.