Archive for April 29th, 2010
2 items.
I’m very ambivalent about Apple as a company, which I’m the first to admit.
I love my iPhone and back in the days of Uni we all used to hang around in “Mac Lab”, but to be honest I’ve always preferred Windows PCs at home. That said, I do keep a peripheral eye on what’s going on in the world of Apple as do friends.
When I heard the other day MacOS X 10.7 woud be adopting an an appstore-like approach to software distribution I wasn’t able to make my mind up on whether or not Apple was phenomenally brilliant or incredibly arrogant.
I’m not the most informed source on this subject but I’ll be interested to see how this plays out. Rather than rail against a single distribution point, I’m actually betting we’ll see a lot of smaller independant software developers welcoming this change, as they see some potential to pushing digitally distributed software out to people from a single distribution point for low cost. There’s a lot of people out there willing to throw five bucks at a good piece of software.
On the other hand, if Apple intends on taking Macs 100% walled-garden, how will the big Vendors like Adobe and Microsoft react? What about Valve and their new Steam Mac beta? How will Apple react to a potential rival software distribution platform on their own OS? And what about that pesky European Parliament? I reckon they’ll throw their legislative weight into the ring at some point in the proceedings.
Regardless of the outcome it will be interesting to see where the state of affairs is Mac fans and their platform of choice is a year from now.
I’d be interested in hearing some different viewpoints on this. Drop me a line by email or hop on the forums if you’ve got anything to add.
