Mon 14 Nov 2005
I think people are misconstruing Havoc’s post as an endorsement of the iPod. They miss the point that it is a successful product and has breath new life into Apple as a company. There is a lesson to be learned there and Havoc seemed to be mussing on finding out what that lesson is. We can go about ignoring the question of why things that are the antithesis of the ideals of Open Source and Open Standards hold such mass market appeal or we can be introspective and ask ourselves what are we not doing that they are doing right. If someone could find the answer to that you will start to see mass market iPod killers that support open formats in more than just geeks hands.
Perhaps in the device arena Nokia can make big wins here. It is making good first steps with the 770 but I hope we see future generation ask those questions and refine themselves beyond the “it runs GNOME” appeal.
Of course there is much more to those questions than just devices. iPod was just an easy target to comment on. Especially in light of add campaigns like “Music is Just Better in Color”. Whaaat?
November 14th, 2005 at 2:16 pm
i can’t post on havocs blog so i’ll post here.
Perhaps a unix analogy would help. Suppose you have a buch of text files and you need to find lines with certain paterns in them. Now do you use grep, or the far more featured and wonderful awk? now suppose you had to pay for grep and awk and you could not afford both (and you can’t use any fancy bash scripting to give awk a grep style interface).
or suppose someone made a superlist program that could do far more than ls. would you bother using it if you didn’t need its new features? what if it was not as good for just listing a directory? what if it would not play nice with pipes to other commands(analogous to how the ipod can plug into lots of devices, mics, fm transmitters, card readers etc)?
November 14th, 2005 at 4:39 pm
What exactly about the iPod makes it the ‘antithesis of the ideals of Open Source and Open Standards’?
November 14th, 2005 at 5:28 pm
Dave,
Heavy use of drm to support lockin through the iTunes music store. But I was more talking about a class of devices. Sure they support mp3 which can be thought of as a defacto standard but be reminded is patent encumbered. So the ideals of Open Source and Open Standards, which promote open markets is sort of trampled on by the iPod. But then again not many other devices do much better and no one really offers pay for ogg sites beyond the Creative Commons stuff.
What I was trying to point out (but again most people want to argue about why such and such words offended the product of their choice) is that any such device that is based on open standards isn’t going to win by saying it is based on open standards. We need to look why the proprietary devices are winning here (and it is not because of their formats though once they do win they win even more through lockin) and figure out how to emulate that and stop thinking we should be winning simply because we are free (as in freedom). I.E. We need to give the masses what they want, not what we want. iPod is just an example here and not one I care to argue over.