> Apple’s current—and in our opinion, objectionable—position is now close to the complete opposite of its initial stance. From promoting openness and standards, the company is now pushing for an ever more locked-down and restricted platform. It’s bad for competition, it’s bad for developers, and it’s bad for consumers. I hope that there will be enough of a backlash that the company is forced to reconsider, but with the draw of all those millions of iPhone (and now, iPad) customers, I fear that Apple’s developers will, perhaps with some reluctance, just accept the restriction and do whatever Cupertino demands.
via [arstechnica.com](http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/apple-takes-aim-at-adobe-or-android.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss)
This article is so broken in its logic that it makes my head spin. They want Apple to be more open, by allowing Flash, which is ten times more closed and non-standard than anything out there. They want Apple to give up control over its own platform so that its competitors can walk in and steal its thunder with ease like Microsoft did in the 80s. Ain’t gonna happen, folks.
Look. If you want to beat Apple, it’s easy. Design a better product. Period. There’s no other way to go about it. If the world really cared about openness and freedom of development tools, they’d stop buying Apple phones and start buying Droids. That’s not happening, as far as I can tell.
And please, stop perpetuating the myth that Apple at one time intended to never open the iPhone OS to third-party developers. That’s just silly. Apple always intended for there to be apps, just as they planned to eventually have Cut and Paste, and even background tasks. What Apple does is develop products and features carefully over time, and release them on their own timeline. Anything they say prior to the release of a feature is marketing 101. You speak positively of the product you have at the time, and you downplay the features that won’t arrive until later.
