A fundamentally flawed defence of the Apple app store
May 20th, 2010 by ravi

In a climate where the market reigns supreme and the mantra “nothing succeeds like success” has never been truer, it should be unsurprising to see someone write:

Thomas Fitzgerald responds to Ted Landau:

I think Ted’s problem, like that of many analysts/bloggers/journalists/geeks etc on the issue is that they’re confusing fundamental flaws with not liking something. People like Ted don’t like the closed nature of the App store, but that doesn’t mean it’s fundamentally flawed, or a lack of choice.

It occurs to me that the App Store’s restrictions and control are to this coming mobile era what Windows’s inferior user interface was to the PC era: something that offends some critics to a degree such that they will insist for years, despite the success and popularity of the platform, that it’s a fatal flaw that will ultimately doom it.

That’s John Gruber, and his distaste for certain types of FOSS is not new (see: 1, 2), though his growing stridence in defence of most things Apple is a bit disappointing. The real confusion here seems to be on the part of Gruber and Landau:

Landau writes that “not liking… closed nature of the App store … doesn’t mean it’s fundamentally flawed”. That is correct – not liking something does not imply that said thing is “fundamentally flawed, but that’s a strawman since nobody I can think of would claim such an implication. Landau has performed a causal sleight of hand, for in the real world, it is often a fundamental flaw that makes people not like something. And what is the possible fundamental flaw of the App Store? That it is closed. One could argue the merits of such a claim (“closed” = “fundamentally flawed”) but that would mean stifling the penchant for personalising arguments.

Gruber, for his part, equates the success of a platform with the absence of fundamental flaws in it. The choiceless and information starved consumer and mindless corporate IT tsars have rendered the verdict. And Microsoft Windows is the winner. The emperor cannot be naked, for he is the emperor. Gruber knows better than that: he spends a good part of his output (including the very post quoted above) defending Apple, a “loser” in this desktop game.

[Link: Daring Fireball Linked List: ‘I Want Choice, but Only if I Agree With Your Choice’]

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