The Totalitarian Regime of Apple

There's an article on CNET at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10011338-37.html entitled Apple boots $1,000 app from App Store. The gist of it is that Apple is being inconsistent and uncommunicative about removing programs from the store.

If you're not familiar with it, the App Store is where third party developers can sell their iPhone applications. The programs must first be approved by Apple and apple keeps 30% of the sale.

Obviously, they hold all the cards -- they own the hardware, the operating system, the development tools, and the distribution network. This is great from an old-school, IBM business model, but Apple doesn't sell to Lockheed Martin suits, Apple sells to the avant-guard, open source, artistic world.

Apple controls 70% of all digital music sold online and could control a quarter of all music sold in the world by 2012 (see http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2008/04/itunes_birthday). In a creative world where content and copyright philosophies are changing, it's appalling to see so much of the world's creativity locked up in one box.

It's a weird psychological twist. Here's the anti-establishment community saying 'We want to build new ways of living and doing business -- where's my iPhone?' I can guarantee you that there would be a mob with torches and a battering ram if anyone other than Apple tried to pull Apple's crap.

Microsoft created a great, open platform. I can buy programs straight from the company that wrote them and I can use my own music software (and organize my files the way I want). The Windows environment created the PC revolution by encouraging innovation, which is why Mac is still only 5% of the desktop market.

Hell, Apple's very success with the iPod is because they were able to develop an interface on Windows. Microsoft doesn't make a dime off music sales through iTunes on Windows -- I seriously doubt Apple would have allowed that to be reversed.

My point is this: Apple is evil. And like anything completely evil, it's seductive. But get past the clean lines, the pretty interface and the 'At least it isn't Microsoft' and fight the totalitarian regime.

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To get further input on this idea, I also posted the question to my Linked in account as follows:

Why do creative, anti-establishment thinkers choose Mac? Apple runs a totalitarian monoculture. It's more like IBM than Google. Hell, Microsoft is more like Google than Apple is like Google. And yet, with the App Store showing how they will at a whim remove software (for which developers paid to develop) and the meglomaniac control of music via iTunes, they continue to prove to be an anti-creative, anti-free thinking, anti-open development platform.

So why do open source, social networkers choose to be duped by the Corporation?

Some of those answers are included below.