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“The seductive angel of death for computing…”

Posted by Zealot on October 18, 2009 – 9:19 am

iphone_skull1 David Weinberger, at his always interesting JoHo the Blog wrote about the Motorola Droid today, noting it probably will not be as pretty or have as many apps as the iPhone, but he would be switching to it from his Blackberry 8830 as soon as possible,

His key reason why he would switch to the Droid after resisting the iPhone for all this time is a perfect and concise statement of everything I have always feared about the App Store and Apple in the silent depths of my soul but have never been able to express well enough to put into writing…

Most of all, though, there won’t be an AppStore. The AppStore is the seductive angel of death for computing. It enables Apple to keep quality up and, more important, to keep support costs down. But a computer that can’t be programmed except by its manufacturer (or with the permission of its manufacturer) isn’t a real computer. The success of the AppStore is a gloomy, scary harbinger. From controlling the apps that can go on its mobile phone, it’s a short step for Apple to decide to control the apps that can go on its rumored slate/netbook device. And since so much of the future of computing will occur on mobiles and netbooks, this portends a serious de-generation of computing, as predicted by Jonathan Zittrain in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.

YES…what he said.

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Zealot (476 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).





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  • What does he mean, there won't be an app store? Android includes an app store, so is Motorola removing it or is Verizon forcing this (possibly so they can use their own app store)?

    Either way, I suspect there will be an app store from somebody.

    Steve
  • I think he meant THE AppStore, that is to say that Droid users won';t have to deal with Apple's App Store.
  • If that's what he meant, it's one for the DUH! file, isn't it? :D I doubt Apple will be opening the App Store to Android....

    Steve
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