Apple has a serious transparency problem.
Apple, king of the tight lip, is really pushing the boundaries these days. Awhile ago I posted why Google isn’t Microsoft. I posted why Apple is the new Microsoft, too. That was about how they want their whole system closed and all encompassing. This post is about how they don’t tell anyone anything.
Apple gets a pass, though, mostly because it is actually innovating new products and features that people want. Some claim that it’s all marketing hype, but these are the feature checklist people, Apple’s stuff has a better design and I don’t just mean the looks, the UI is easier for most people to grasp so they use what features are offered better.
Recently I did a completely random TV interview with a Japanese channel about the iPhone (believe me totally random), I asked the reporter if the early notions that the iPhone would never play in Japan because they already had such sophisticated phones held any water. He was like, everyone was dieing for the iPhone there because sure you could do a lot on those phones, but no one knew how to do anything so they barely used any of the features. I’m just saying.
So good, it’s innovating and pushing out products. As it grows and grows and its aspirations and product line move well beyond their original core computer user fans, you can see cracks start to form in its teflon coat. All of this stems from their completely closed and secret ecosystem. A bunch of posts rolled through my Reader yesterday highlighting this.
Stupid stuff
Apple does stupid stuff. It won’t talk about it’s security practices at all - an Apple engineer was set to give a talk on how they take security seriously at the Black Hat conference, till marketing got wind of it and put the kibosh on. They thought they’d be able to do it because there’d be no Q&A, just a one way talk - it could have been put through marketing, but could have shed some light on Apple’s security practices, something very important to do. But even this is a big no no.
(compare and contrast with Microsoft these days officially launching not one but two initiatives at that same conference)
Or how the iPhone SDK is still under NDA. Developers can’t talk to each other and figure out the best way to do things and build a general community to foster more and better development. This is outright hurting Apple - they do this (possibly) to prevent other companies from download the SDK. But they’re already light years ahead of the other companies, they should be trying to foster a hardcore developer community that’s going to be welcoming more and more - like the Treo before, that’s going to be the huge moat people will eventually need to cross to get at an established iPhone market.
Or the iPhone 2.0.1 update, it’s a huge update 250MB or so - why does it list as the change only “bug fixes”? Come on! Let me know what I’m getting. On the one hand, the Apple updates are easy and a comparative joy to install as compared to updating my Treo. On the other hand, when you download new Treo firmware, Palm provided a nice bulleted list of what was going to change with the new software.
They pull apps without warning or notice, like NetShare, BoxOffice (my own personal favourite), even Cube Runner. Sometimes it seems that Apple gets in touch (after much, much online agitation and general bad PR) with folks and sometimes it never does. Speculation is rampant. This does no good for Apple. It’s inexcusable that with the number of pulls it is making that it doesn’t get in touch with the developer immediately upon taking the app down.
The Future
To me this is a sign of the times to come. Apple’s new found dominance is allowing all this to happen - they don’t need to care about what developers think because the developers all have to suck it up anyway. What? Are they going to take their ball and walk away from the iPhone game? Yeah. No. Reminds me of another company. For the time Apple has the good fortune to have a visionary head and a culture of innovation. In many ways, though, it’s because they never really had an existing revenue stream to defend. It’s easy to innovate when you’ve got nothing to lose. (Ok, it isn’t easy, but it’s easier).
However, as they grow and as their products become entrenched and represent huge amounts of money, I wonder if Apple will always continue to be the ones that create new products to cannibalize their own. If they’ll always have the nuts to make a new OS without built significant backwards compatibility to their old. If they’ll always have the nuts to change the underlying guts of their hardware like when they switched to Intel.
My guess is that like all little companies that grow into big companies they are going to slow down and become less relevant. It’s just unfortunate that they’re already showing all the bad big company tendencies so early on in the arc. In many ways they are much worse then Microsoft already - getting away with things that company never would be able to. But, they make products that people want and love and for now that is enough. We’ll see for how long, though. Who knows, maybe they’ll change it up a little.
