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Apple and openness Posted: May 11, 2004 Uttam Narsu, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc. |
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George wrote "openness and interoperability be damned" and "It's not open, and it's not industry standard or industry-certified."
Interestingly enough, Apple is more open than they have ever been in their history. OS X is based on open-source BSD, new protocols are based on industry standards (Rendevous/zeroconf and ethernet replace AppleTalk), Safari (based on the open-source KDE browser) replaces IE, and the list goes on. Indeed, Apple has even donated their changes back to the open source community. A canny move on Apple's part-- they delegate the commoditized network, middleware and infrastructure pieces to the open source community, and they get to innovate with proprietary software on top, enabling them to concentrate on usability not bits and bytes, and lowering their total cost of development. This openness has attracted open source developers who care about usability (admittedly a small percentage!). Just look around at open source conferences and see what laptops the heavy hitters in the community use. The shame is that Jobs had an opportunity to make the Mac what the Linux desktop is becoming, but that would have required running on Intel, something he was loathe to do. And now as Linux desktops get better, the window closes on attracting the one developer community who still might care about the Mac-- the open source community. But hey-- I love my ipod...
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