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Hey Mike, I told you so

Saturday, August 01, 2009 by Dave Winer.

In Sept 2008 Mike Arrington over on TechCrunch said that no matter how bizarre the setup over at the App Store, I would "keep developing for the iPhone," even though I had never developed for it. Obvious nonsense. Even if it was a wide-open platform I would have only considered investing in iPhone apps. I wouldn't have gotten the skill myself because it looked like a dead-end, and by Sept 2008 we knew it was headed toward the mess it has now become. You heard it here first.  

The iPhone should have run the same software as the Macintosh. When I first heard about it, I misunderstood and thought I'd be able to write Frontier scripts that ran both on my desktop and the phone. I was a Blackberry user at the time, and I found the idea of a MacPhone truly inspiring. From there, it went downhill, and downhill and downhill. This platform was Apple's revenge on developers. Everything under their control. You couldn't even ship a product that Apple didn't approve of! Obviously that was going to be abused, and it has been, but finally it's become so ridiculous that it's obvious, even to Mike, that it can't work.  

I've been through this loop many times, this is Mike's first. The only platform that really works is a platform with no platform vendor, and that's the Internet.  

Steve Jobs is the anti-Internet. The Internet is utilitarian, it works, but it's ugly. Jobs's stuff is so beautiful that when taken to its logical conclusion, and he's almost there now, it's so dazzling, so beautiful that you fail to see that it is also useless. 

There's still a ton of Woz in the Mac, I am typing this on a gorgeous unibody MacBook Pro, which is probably the most lovely computer I've ever used. The software I'm using has never been approved by Apple, and can be downloaded from the Internet. Next to it is an iPhone, which I use only as a phone, an IM device and a communicating camera. It sucks as a phone. The IM is okay and the camera is really nice. But as a platform it's a complete total disappointment.