Until now I've been fairly pleased with Apple as a company. Now they seem to be turning into Micro$oft of the late 90s. Catch up by reading this little article: AlterNet: Rotten Apple? by Scott Thill.
Not only has Apple been unfriendly to the people who have generated a lot of buzz for their products, but they are also playing some sketchy games. For example, their use of AAC for the iTunes music store is very suspicious. Basically nothing plays that format except iPod and iTunes. This is so M$-like.
Of course the flip side is that OS X is still based on unix, and the open-source community is flourishing and producing all kinds of great applications for the Macs. Perhaps this is a limit on Apple's ability to control their loyal customers. Yes they want us to buy their stuff, and on the surface it only behaves how they want it to. Underneath that though, there are well-known structures that can be manipulated, and there are lots of people with desire and skills to make things work in different ways. By tapping into the tech-savy Unix/Linux market, Apple may well have saved their products from becoming truly niche products that only serve a small subset of people. Now if we could just work on their marketing and legal teams....
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