Its always surprising to see the number of powerbooks in the audience at F/OSS conferences. In 5 years time - cut that number by 70% - bank on that. Why? Becuase most geeks either agree with Doc Searls - or given two technically compelling options, will chose the one with a more friendly relationship. Folks, so will writers in the online age. So will writers. Apple Computer should be afraid - well wary, at least, of what too much time in court can do. No, not from Paul McCartney. When some of Apple’s larger corporate customers in one of their key niche’s (media businesses) sign an amicus brief againt them in a lawsuit, well - you figure it out! Using “trade secrets” as an excuse to dig through a journalist’s sources is infinitely regressive. If you allow this, you could allow AT&T to get away with spying on Americans for the NSA and call it a protected secret. Even as mainstream media is facing stiff competition from solo bloggers, citizen journalists, and river-of-news disintermediation, this is significant because we the ‘new’ media, from the largest newspaper to the single blogger all value free press. I’m happy to see that the Copley Press / Union-Tribune (my employer) has, among industry peers and the SPJ, joined in signature on amicus for this suit. [ disclaimer ] Great words from a victim of Apple’s assault on the free press, Jason D. O’Grady, via ZDNet blog:
“…the reason why a house cat doesn’t eat you is because it’s smaller than you. He went on to say that if the cat was larger than you it sure as hell would eat you. It appears that Apple used to be a small, friendly cat and now (thanks in large part to the success of the iPod) it’s a whole lot bigger - and starting to eat people. “Tiger” indeed.”
At work our development team uses Macs, not by requirement, but for convenience. Though I use Linux at work, my wife and I own 3 Macs at home. We each own iPods. To paraphase Dilbert, I’m not anti-mac, I’m anti-idiot. I’m not calling Jobs and Apple lawyers stupid - just socially inept. Less like Bush - more like Cheney without the cursing. Or Alberto Gonzales — a good parallel on the secrecy-as-excuse front. The thing that drives most recent Mac users to be Mac users among the early adopter / geek crowd is that things “just work.” Linux is improving faster than OS X - thanks to, among other things, a vibrant user-space of apps that Apple won’t push into OS. Things will “just work” in Dapper about as well as they do in Tiger: preemptive kernel, HAL, DBUS, hot-docking devices, NetworkManager, deskbar+Beagle, Tango and Freedesktop.org standards. And Linux doesn’t treat server apps like second-class citizens in the performance department. Ubuntu and Fedora are 1 year away from having feature parity for busy ‘pragmatist’ geeks who split spaces across the chasm at between enthusiast, early adopter, and early majority in various roles and aspects of their lives. I would estimate Apple’s half-life among this crowd at about 3.5 years (total guess) - but it could be a lot less if Apple’s Tiger didn’t leave teeth-marks on the collective attitude of their beachhead market. It is not just about the “little guy” bloggers: Apple need remember not to mess with folks who buy ink buy the gallon. Many Apple users fall into similar demographics with newspaper readers (in print and online). The media might just use that ink to make Apple’s legal actions more visible, and stop using that ink to sign checks to Apple on important purchases. So Apple could lose the geek crowd - so what? If you think the iPod will save them in the long-haul, look where Sony is now. The mainstream follows the geek and blogger elites Apple is pissing off. Apple needs more than hype and lawsuits to stay a productive member of the conversation.