I've been wanting to rant about this for a while, and now BetaNews' article on the iPhone not being a smartphone gives me reason to.
You know, I always thought Steve Jobs was a pretty smart guy. The decision to license the Mac OS aside, he's a brilliant marketer who has made some very smart moves. And then came an interview with Newsweek's Steven Levy about the iPhone (more commonly known as iTrash):
But it’s not like the walled garden has gone away. “You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider's network, says Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”
Man, that's gotta be news to Cingular and Microsoft. They've had an open platform for cell phones for a while now, and I haven't read anything about how Company X's line-of-business application taking down Cingular's network. Steve must think we're all stupid enough to buy that like of crap... well, either that or he actually believes what he said. Either way that single statement totally destroyed any credibility that guy had with me (which wasn't much to begin with). It's nothing more than a badly-veiled attempt to lock customers into their closed-box model of doing business.
And this is why I hate Apple. It's not some stupid OS holy war thing, it's a very basic premise: Microsoft is in business to further their profits by creating ecosystems by which smaller companies can create their own systems on top of, like a whale with millions of tiny barnacles attached to it. Apple is only in business for the betterment of Apple, and like a petulant child, they want as much control over everything as possible. Microsoft tries to co-opt everyone in (yes, I'm aware of their past... they haven't always been friendly about it), while Apple locks customers in and third parties out.
That's why I don't understand why Open Source fans like Apple so much. It's one of the most closed-off tech companies on the planet. That's why I've been a fan of Microsoft for so long, and why I'll continue publicly supporting them until someone sews my mouth shut and cuts off my fingers.