Jobs is right, we have a choice. In a recent heated email discussion between Gawker Media employee Ryan Tate and Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Tate criticised Apple for forcing developers to build their iPhone/iPad apps in Apple’s native Cocoa API), instead of being allowed to use other means (such as Adobe Flash/AIR).
Jobs replied:
Wait - of cause they don’t have to. They don’t need to publish on the iPad if they don’t want to. No one is forcing them. But it appears that they DO want to.
This is the same argument that Google offer when criticised about privacy issues with their applications, and it’s completely right. There is a choice, but it’s a frustrating choice, as to go elsewhere usually means moving to a poorer alternative. Gmail is a far better webmail system than Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, just as the iPad is far better than any other tablet device currently available.
So if there is nothing better to move to, then what option is there? The option is to make your own option. The web is filled with great examples of similar situations where people have not been happy with the alternatives to the status quo, and so have made their own. Firefox and Linux are two great examples of this, and more recently Diaspora, an open social network being developed in response to the lack of alternatives to Facebook. The amount of public funding this project has received is a clear indication that people are willing to support such alternatives. The OLPC XO-1 showed us what is possible to achieve with hardware, and even though it’s no MacBook killer, the proposed plans for the XO-3 are sure to cause waves if the OLPC Project can pull it off, which with more public support, is completely possible.
As Jobs boasts, there are currently 200,000 plus apps in the iTunes app store. But pretty much all of these have been built by independent developers, not by Apple, and the iPhone and iPad are only a success because of these apps. If developers are truly unhappy with where Apple is headed and the limitations that are being enforced on them by the iTunes app store, then start by directing support to a platform that doesn’t have such limitations. And if none exists, make your own.
As Clay Shirky states in his book Here Comes Everybody, Linus Torvalds would never have gotten any where if all he had done was petition Microsoft to make Window more open. Only by taking action to create an alternative OS did Torvalds get Microsoft’s attention.
The options are out there, you just have to create them.