In reply to Jason Calacanis's recent post entitled The case against Apple - in Five Parts - one of my coworkers asked for my input. What follows is my somewhat lengthy reply which I thought I would share with everyone.

Jason has some good arguments, but I think he’s essentially missing the precepts of Apple’s design (as I see it):

• It has to be immensely intuitive and simple to use
• It has to be a masterpiece of industrial design

Specifically looking at the case of the iPod, it does one thing (plays music) and does it well.
There’s no need for it to do anything else, because they’re not aiming at that market – the product perfectly matches the (simple) set of requirements.

If you have different needs, there are still a ton of competing products out there to cater to your specific needs. This is almost a perfect example of a competitive market.

Also, if people are worried about their music and DRM/licensing – they should choose to buy it from a DRM-free location where they can download it. Actually come to think of it, Apple already offers DRM-free music from some labels. Don’t hate on them for not doing this originally, it’s a near certainty that they didn’t have the market power with the labels when they first launched.

With the iPhone the argument is pretty similar, however it’s important to note that Apple must do what they can to protect their investment. Part of the beauty of this product from a technical point of view, is that the software and hardware configurations are the same everywhere. It’s the same argument as with video game consoles, it works because the manufacturer puts things in place to make it easy for developers to deploy for it.

If Apple allowed a bajillion web browsers for example, what would happen when Opera is installed and is the default browsing app? Would other applications need to support launching Opera, would it just do it automatically? If so, can Opera handle all the iPhone specific display tags? It’s in their best interest to protect this investment, and to a certain point I can agree with the restricted platform – remembering that convergence be damned, its primary function is still being a telephone.

I think it’s laughable that people can make the argument that we’re headed towards an Apple monoculture – it’s not Apple’s responsibility to create competition, it’s the competitors who need to step up.

Further to this, have a look at what Apple’s innovation on the iPod and iPhone’s respective markets! Their product is setting new usability and design standards and injecting new and fresh ideas on how to make a simple mp3 player work better, and the number of yum-cha rip-offs reflect this.

In summary, I think it’s business as usual and from my perspective I don’t think Apple are doing anything inherently evil – in fact, I think we should congratulate them for bringing a brilliant product to market – their sales figures clearly indicate they’re doing something right.

It's been a while since I've posted, though on the whole I've been happy with the subject matter and quality of my posts recently - it seems I'm managing to be doing a lot more of the things that interest me, perhaps this is a good sign that things are well in my world, or maybe I've just reached a point of delusion where I'm too far detached from reality to notice. Either way, things are coming up Milhouse!

Since I last posted, I've moved from living in a fairly decrepit share house to sharing a lovely brand new villa with two reasonable people I can deal with on a daily basis - let's hope it stays that way, as I'm starting to feel at home for the first time in three years. It might have something to do with the fact that I have space to hang up my clothes properly and to unpack my bookshelf (yay). Not to mention that I've finally got space and the (kind of) right mental mindset to go through all my plastic tubs of hoarded junk and ditch it all (10 tubs down, 15 to go!)

Recently my out-of-work time and sanity has been wrapped up in a project I've come to realise was a really bad decision, and once I can clean my hands of it - I'll be able to start enjoying my evenings again, and will be able to pursue some more projects of interest. I'm reading into Operating System design theory in my spare time at work, and have even cobbled together the rough basics of my own bootable system that can write to the console. It's a bit on the sad side, but my brain definately feels engaged - which again, is a nice change.

In three weeks I'll be attending my first AusNOG Conference in Sydney, which should be a blast and pretty interesting. If I can knock off my failed project and sort out some outstanding issues, I should be able to use the extra time I've booked in Sydney to unwind and get rid of this stress-induced skin irritation - lovely. I've also decided that next year I'm going to plan to attend The Gathering, one of the most awesome demo parties around in Europe, as well as DEFCON, THE security conference.

On a completely unrelated note, I'd like to plug Adam Frisby's blog. I went to school with Adam and have kept somewhat in touch since, we have fairly similar interests - but he's always working on something interesting and his blog posts are a brilliant read.

I'm also hoping to sit down at some stage and finalise a layout for this site - it irks me that I'm using someone elses design, yet I'm never happy with anything I come up with. Oh well, happy days.

One of the most interesting concepts I've taken from Scott Adams book God's Debris, is that laws are made for the common good of society as certain behaviour is detrimental to the community for a number of reasons.

Whilst on the surface this is a reasonably obvious statement, I've spent an increasing amount of time thinking about this. Things that don't work for society have punishments attached, and there's a whole hidden economy here - for simplicity's sake, I'll call it Naughty Tax.

If you're running late for an important business meeting, you might weigh up the cost of a speeding fine versus how important the meeting is (and what impact there is of being late). This is a fairly common example, and shows that most people might make this comparison every day. Taking this a little further, you might regularly speed through streets on the basis that the percentage of times you get caught and the penalties are worth it for the convenience gained by doing what you want to.

There's a potential mindset here for individuals to consider the legal system less as a system of denouncing certain behaviour, but rather as a tax for doing what you like. We've all heard of the phrase stating that the rich keep on getting richer, and if you think about it in this context - the rich have a much higher capability of paying naughty tax, therefore the equation balances in their favour.

Right about now, I should probably note that I'm in no way advocating anything such as child exploitation, murder or rape - these are things that violate my personal code, and I think should be 'taxed' to the highest amount (long jail term, etc).

Likewise, if this behaviour were to become the norm - this behaviour would cause exactly the type of effect that the laws were introduced to stop, impacting on society in a negative way.

It would be interesting to see what society would be like if instead of condemning behaviour in the current manner, it was generally regarded as a tax - would the tax be higher to stop people from doing it then? Because If that were the case, then today's tax is clearly not high enough - because we can already make the choice to break the law.

I'll leave you all to ponder the rammifications of that one :)