You know, this whole Apple thing finally makes sense to me.
They are simply trying to tie their developer community to their platform. Now is the time to do it, when competition is low. There's virtually no chance of this having any noticeable impact in its established community of developers. By year-end, when competition is a bit stronger, the groundwork they've put in place today will make it less likely that developers will bother to learn another platform.
Its what Microsoft did with Java and Netscape. It's what they did with IE.
I'm not saying its right. I'm just saying I finally understand it.
(and I know MS was sued, and lost, for each of those infractions).
> They are simply trying to tie their developer community to their platform.
No, they are trying to tie the _consumer_ to their platform. They couldn't care less about developers outside them providing consumers a reason to buy their product. (and as a source of revenue.)
Apple _does_ want to control what _media_ can be played on their platform. And they way to control that is to control what developers can do. Notice there is no VLC on the iPhone? No Mplayer? No open codecs what-so-ever. (and certainly no FLASH...) At some point expect there to be a (surprise!!!) clamp down on h264 encoding, enforced by patents and licenses.
They are simply trying to tie their developer community to their platform. Now is the time to do it, when competition is low. There's virtually no chance of this having any noticeable impact in its established community of developers. By year-end, when competition is a bit stronger, the groundwork they've put in place today will make it less likely that developers will bother to learn another platform.
Its what Microsoft did with Java and Netscape. It's what they did with IE.
I'm not saying its right. I'm just saying I finally understand it.
(and I know MS was sued, and lost, for each of those infractions).