Is Zittrain confused about Apple?

Or is he confused about freedom?

Zittrain's opinion piece "A Fight for Freedom at Apple's Core" in the Financial Times (February 3rd, 2010) caught my eye.

It's worth reading, but I think it is largely wrong, partly because Zittrain does not make it clear what kind of freedom he is talking about, but also because he gets so many facts wrong.

Zittrain's argument seems to be that Apple used to be open but is now closed. That the freedom that was present for the original Apple computer has disappeared for the iPhone (and presumably, the iPad).

In reality, the iPhone is closed in some respects and open in others. Zittrain's opening statements, that the original Apple computer allowed you to write software, is true - but fundamentally misleading. The iPhone does too.

Sure, the iPhone doesn't boot up to a BASIC prompt, but that's because it's a phone (and media player, email device and much more). But if you want to write software for it, you can. And you can do this freely: Apple make the tools and SDK available at no cost; with these tools you can write fully fledged iPhone applications.

This makes the iPhone much more open than the early Macintosh computers. If you wanted to develop software for these, you needed to buy tools from Apple or third parties. This was sufficiently expensive that it could rule out casual software development for the Macintosh by amateurs.

Apple seems to have learned from this. They now make a rich set of software development tools available for the Macintosh and the iPhone. Both are accompanied by good documentation. And it all costs nothing; you can download them now.

What's changed with the iPhone, is that Apple now provides an online store for the sale and distribution of applications. Apple decides what is allowed in the store. This makes Apple, as Zittrain says, the "gatekeeper". But it also provides advantages: small-time software developers now have a global route to market and a means of being paid for their wares. And iPhone users have an easy means of finding software that (mostly) works and which they can pay for safely too.

So while Apple does exercise some control on the primary means of commercial distribution, it is not altogether a bad thing. Look at the figures: there are a huge number of applications now available and being downloaded from the App store (over 130,000 and 3 billion respectively, according to Wikipedia)

Users of the iPhone "No longer own or control the apps they run" writes Zittrain. What does he mean?

Users "own" the software they buy from the App Store as much as they "own" any software under a commercial license agreement. If you've read one of these (does anyone? Even Zittrain?) you will have noticed that they almost always tell you that you do not own the software. Instead, you own a CDROM (assuming you have any physical asset at all) and have bought limited rights to use the software under particular circumstances. Along the way, you will probably have agreed that the software need not work and that you indemnify the company that licenses the software completely against any damage the software might do.

And what on earth does Zittrain mean by "control"? I have no idea, and he does not say.

Nor is it true that customers of the App Store "rent [the applications] minute by minute." No they don't. Where does this stuff come from?

"Hope lies in more balanced combinations of open and closed systems," according to Zittrain, implying that the Apple scheme is unbalanced and therefore bad without really having provided convincing evidence for either.

What is the right balance? One that delivers the most benefit to the greatest number of customers. That market is world has changed a great deal from the time of the early personal computer. The vast majority of personal computer and smartphone buyers will not write any software. They are buying a tool and they want it to work.

I think there are some interesting analogies with the motor industry. Early owners of motor cars could reasonably expect to have to be an expert mechanic, to understand how the car worked, effect their own repairs and perhaps make their own modifications. The modern car is a "closed" system. Sure, you can find places that will let you download new software for the ECU, and there are keen hobbyists who tweak things, strip the engine, change the exhaust, buy different wheels, spoilers and so on.

It seems to me perfectly reasonable that computers and smart phones will go the same way, at least for the majority of users. Computer hobbyists will persist, happily downloading device drivers from random sites on the Internet and debating the performance of different motherboards. But that is not what interests most users. The change will take a while, but it is coming, and coming faster in the smartphone world than it has with conventional personal computers.

As seamless user experiences go, the iPhone is a great example of how things can be done, and of how successful they can be in the marketplace.

Predictions

Predicting the future is tough. But we still seem happy to quote "experts" who happily deliver us all sorts of predictions. Some of them even get paid for the stuff they churn out.

I came across one nice example yesterday while looking up some references for Apple's "Rosetta" technology that was used to assist in the transition from PowerPC to Intel processors for the Macintosh.

A CNET article quotes an "Illuminata analyst" (someone who should know, I guess) who says "History says that binary translation basically doesn't work."

He goes on to say that "The day may come when someone can do a goood enough job with it, but that concept has been thrown out there many times in the computer industry, and it's always fallen flat on its face."

Well, Rosetta did work, though to be fair, the comments above fall some way short of predicting its failure. They just hint strongly that success is very unlikely.

The financial world is a wonderful source of failed predictions too. What about UK house prices? In the news today is a report from the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors. At the beginning of the year, they were predicting falls in prices of 10-15% this year; now it says prices may rise slightly. That's quite a shift.

Economic forecasts generally seem to be pretty pointless. None of them predicted the current recession, the most severe since the great depression. So why bother?

Weather forecasts? The UK Met Office predicted a hot, dry "barbecue summer" and instead we have just had a July with twice the average rainfall, though the Met Office has published some stats to convince us that it really hasn't been that bad.

I have a prediction. This year, we will finally see that producing pointless predictions is futile and we will give up. I will also win the lottery.

Remember, you read it here first.

Apple Macintoshes

I've just bought my seventh Macintosh. That's ignoring the three that I've had provided for me by employers over the years. Now that I'm waiting for the seventh to be delivered, it seems like a good time to look back and see how things have changed over the years.

My first Mac was a Macintosh Plus. 1MB memory, single 800K 3.5" floppy disk, monochrome screen. The processor was a Motorola 68000 running at the amazing speed of 8MHz. The big thing that the Plus had over the original Macintosh (apart from loads of memory) was expandability: it had a SCSI interface that meant you could add one (or more) external hard disks. I invested a huge amount of money in a 20MB external drive. The Mac was used mostly for writing - my then partner's PhD on the Formanifera of the Thousand Islands Group - and the favourite application of the time was Microsoft Word, version 3.0 if I recall correctly.

I still think that version of Word was one of the best that Microsoft produced. It had styles, allowing some consistency to be imposed on the structure of the document, and you could edit files of "any" size, something that was a novelty back then when many applications imposed pretty arbitrary restrictions. It wasn't quite as snappy as WriteNow! but it worked well. Best of all, it lacked the huge array of superfluous features that get in the way of using recent versions of Word effectively.

It took several years for the finances to recover sufficiently for Macintosh number 2. This was an SE/30. 5MB memory, 40MB internal hard disk and a Motorola 68030 processor running at 16MHz. It was heinously expensive, somewhere over £2,000 if I recall correctly. The form factor was essentially the same as the Plus, with the same built-in 9" monochrome screen. I wrote most of my PhD on this, using TeXtures, a commercial version of TeX and LaTeX.

At around the same time, I got my hands on my first employer-provided Macintosh, a IIsi. This was equipped with an Ethernet card, and had a separate monitor. You could get a colour monitor for the IIsi, but colour monitors were expensive and definitely seen as unecessary in my line of work, so I still had monochrome - though now with scales of grey. The IIsi made a change from the Sun 3/60 diskless workstation that I'd been using up to that point, but the best feature was that it ran Macintosh Common Lisp, one of the nicest development environments that I'd come across at the time.

The SE/30 lasted some time, but back at work, a new research grant allowed the IIsi to be replaced by a Quadra 800, one of the last Macintosh computers based on the Motorola line of processors. This was a monster compared to the previous machines. A Motorola 68040 33MHz processor and 8MB memory. I had a pretty minimal configuration - no CD, since it was too expensive - and a mere 230MB hard disk, but it was still by far the most powerful desktop machine I'd had my hands on at the time. The internet was kicking off too, and it was probably on this machine that I played with NCSA Mosaic, Gopher and Archie visited a rudimentary list of websites called "Yahoo!" and waited for the "information superhighway" to appear.

The Quadra 800 was a great machine, but my next purchase was a disappointment. This was a Power Macintosh 7500, one of the first Apple machines built around the then new PowerPC processor architecture.

On paper, the 7500 looked great. A fast 100MHz processor on a daughter card that could be replaced, twin SCSI busses for internal and external disk expansion, built-in ethernet, huge memory capacity and some advanced video capability. The problem was that by this point, Mac OS was beginning to creak. There were lots of "system extensions" - random bits of software that loaded at boot time, including drivers for bits of hardware and various tweaks for the OS. But there was no protection between these extensions, nor between them and the OS, or applications. The result was occasional random crashes, or more often, a refusal to boot. At this point, the only remedy seemed to be removing random extensions until things started working again. The complexity was increased by Apple's need to support legacy 680x0 binaries, though whether this contributed to the disappointing performance and instability isn't clear.

The 7500 was connected to a Hayes 28Kbps modem, and I started getting to grips with PPP so I could connect to the Internet, first via Sussex University, then through Demon Internet. Well, it worked, though looking back on it, I'm surprised I had the patience.

That was it, for a few years. I was doing lots of work with Solaris and had a dual boot Solaris x86/Windows NT laptop which was significantly more stable than Mac OS 8 or 9 in either mode. Worse, Apple persisted in making it expensive to get hold of development tools for Mac OS. I bought third party tools like MetroWerks Codewarrior but never invested the time necessary to build anything significant.

I moved on from Solaris and Windows NT to Red Hat Linux and Windows 98. Linux was great, allowing us to build some amazingly robust server side software in Java at very little cost. Windows 98 was a less glorious experience, though I had a wonderfully tiny Sony 505GX laptop that seems to have been an early precursor of the current netbook trend.

When Mac OS X first appeared, my initial reaction was curiosity combined with scepticism. The critical test seemed to be whether Apple would remain in existence for long enough to make OS X worth considering. Other new operating systems (Be, for example) had not lasted long and had never gained a critical mass of developers and applications.

Eventually, Microsoft released a version of Office for OS X. I bought a new iMac G4 and a copy of Microsoft Office. I was blown away. UNIX with a decent user interface, at last! The hardware was pretty impressive too: colour, flat-panel display, 700MHz processor and 256MB memory, 40GB hard disk. Better still, Apple remedied some of their failings in the past: OS X shipped with pretty good and comprehensive developer tools including compilers, an IDE and a variety of debugging and tuning tools.

Based on the experience of the iMac, an iBook swiftly followed. Then the iMac was replaced by a G5. The iBook died but the iMac continues to be the workhorse of some friends.

What's next? Well, having enjoyed using a Macbook Pro for the last two years (having persuaded my employer that this was a "good thing"), I'm shortly to take delivery of my own MacBook Pro. I wouldn't bother, but I'm leaving the old company and they won't let me keep the hardware. Along the way, Apple has switched processor families once again, from the PowerPC line to Intel. The transition (thanks in part to some technology from Transitive Inc, now part of IBM) has been seamless.

Just for fun, here's a rough comparison of my first Mac with the latest:

Mac Plus	Macbook Pro	Multiplier
MC 68000, 8MHz	Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.53GHz	300 times faster
1MB	4GB	4000 times more memory
800KB	250GB	300,000 times more storage
512x342 monochrome	1280x800 colour	Around 5 times more pixels