Sep 2008
A petition too far?
25/09/2008 16:21 Filed in: All things
Apple!
OK I have to admit it I succumbed and purchased an
iPhone 3G this July and mightily impressed I am too!
What I am not so impressed by is Apples restrictive behaviour towards its App Store developers, their use of NDA’s to silence those developers is nothing short of draconian. I was also gobsmacked that Apple felt it could restrict Apps to those which it felt didn’t conflict with its own products. In fact I (along with several thousand others) was so incensed that I felt compelled to launch a petition to Steve Jobs...
http://www.petitiononline.com/appstore/petition.html
One of the things that amazed me was the negativity of some of the American Mac sites, who steadfastly refused to publicise the petition. It was pointed out to me by one of the editors of a ‘non-american’ Mac site which did publish the petition details that many of the US sites were just mouthpieces for the corporate Apple PR machine. This is something I would not have believed until I had actually experienced it for myself! Call me paranoid but I did start to receive an awful lot of site traffic from California US, luckily I had crossed the T’s and dotted the i’s in relation to my comments on Apple and their trademarks otherwise....
Four months on from the iPhones 3Gs launch there are still no plans to launch step by step navigation software, surely this was the whole point of incorporating 3G (or at least so I thought). I relished the opportunity to replace my ageing P1i phone, and recently stolen TomTom and Ipod with one device - the iPhone! While my hopes of navigation software may have been dashed (or at least in the short term) the iPhone has surpassed my expectations, to say that this thing is just a phone is like calling OJ a wife beater and IMHO comparisons of the iPhone with Netbooks are really not that far off!
I really do hope that Apple does not become another Microsoft (or Google come to that!). I sense that as the company grows and loses touch with its customer base this kind of behaviour is inevitable. Lets hope there’s plenty of customers out there prepared to be vocal, sign petitions and reel the company in when it gets out of line!
What I am not so impressed by is Apples restrictive behaviour towards its App Store developers, their use of NDA’s to silence those developers is nothing short of draconian. I was also gobsmacked that Apple felt it could restrict Apps to those which it felt didn’t conflict with its own products. In fact I (along with several thousand others) was so incensed that I felt compelled to launch a petition to Steve Jobs...
http://www.petitiononline.com/appstore/petition.html
One of the things that amazed me was the negativity of some of the American Mac sites, who steadfastly refused to publicise the petition. It was pointed out to me by one of the editors of a ‘non-american’ Mac site which did publish the petition details that many of the US sites were just mouthpieces for the corporate Apple PR machine. This is something I would not have believed until I had actually experienced it for myself! Call me paranoid but I did start to receive an awful lot of site traffic from California US, luckily I had crossed the T’s and dotted the i’s in relation to my comments on Apple and their trademarks otherwise....
Four months on from the iPhones 3Gs launch there are still no plans to launch step by step navigation software, surely this was the whole point of incorporating 3G (or at least so I thought). I relished the opportunity to replace my ageing P1i phone, and recently stolen TomTom and Ipod with one device - the iPhone! While my hopes of navigation software may have been dashed (or at least in the short term) the iPhone has surpassed my expectations, to say that this thing is just a phone is like calling OJ a wife beater and IMHO comparisons of the iPhone with Netbooks are really not that far off!
I really do hope that Apple does not become another Microsoft (or Google come to that!). I sense that as the company grows and loses touch with its customer base this kind of behaviour is inevitable. Lets hope there’s plenty of customers out there prepared to be vocal, sign petitions and reel the company in when it gets out of line!
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