Is this the future fate faced by most acquired tech companies? Is the cash worth it to founders who have to watch their creations slowly decline into obsolescence? Is freedom better than building and honing a big, popular product? When a company is bought, does it deserve acquisition congratulations or condolences?
Depressing, but it’s not clear to me that Yahoo is an outlier here.
Whenever a policy change like this occurs, I ask, How does this strengthen the platform? How does this sell more iPhones? I can’t answer either of those questions, and that, to me, is the most interesting part of this whole debate.
I prefer the Apple that makes its money by creating great, high-end, high-margin products and selling them directly to consumers. I am less fond of an Apple that makes money by striking or demanding dubious business deals. Forget my personal biases - I’m just saying, the former Apple would be interested in delivering stuff I would buy with my money and put in my pocket or my living room. The latter Apple would have more to gain by fleecing the supply and shoveling whatevers at me.
Marco Arment on the Jobs SaaS e-mail:
And even if Jobs himself would take a few minutes (during his medical leave, no less) to answer these questions more verbosely for some guy in an email, it would raise a different question: Why don’t the published guidelines reflect this clarification, and what’s stopping whoever gets your submission on the App Review team from following the literal definition?
If the iPad grows like many of us expect it to, siphoning a third of the cash flow around everyday computers will create a completely different economic environment than exists today.
Dr. Drang compares Simplenote, Elements, PlainText, and Nebulous Notes (via John Gruber). I’m currently using the built-in Notes app, which is fine on the iPhone but not great on the Mac (in Mail). I’d rather use EagleFiler and BBEdit, so I’m considering switching to a Dropbox-based solution.
Andrew McAfee (via Jeff Johnson):
I’ve been doing some poking around, and have found that it’s pretty straightforward for one person (let’s call him George Smiley, after John Le Carré’s master spy) to find out what music, video, and apps someone else (like me) has purchased or had gifted to them on iTunes.
Probably not a huge deal for most people, but it would be nice for Apple to respect the user’s privacy by default. We’ll see what happens when iBooks supports gifting. The Kindle solution seems reasonable.
