The ugly side of Apple

Sam Varghese
Friday, 20 February 2009 04:35

IT Industry - Market

Apple Computer has a beautiful side to its operations. That's the side which comes out with some of the sexiest design in the tech world, the side which crafts those breathtaking interfaces, the side which gives you those applications that a five-year-old finds easy to master in the course of a morning's exploration.
An outsider like me likes to think of those aspects as being part of the heritage left by the real Mr Apple, Steve Wozniak, whom I privately refer to as the greater Steve.

And then, there's the ugly side of Apple. Lawsuits against people who reveal details of products before the current Mr Apple, Steve Jobs (I call him the lesser Steve), announces them using sound and light effects, are one aspect of this side of Apple's character.

Another is taking recourse to draconian legislation like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in order to prevent others from competing. When companies do this, it is generally because there is always an underlying fear that, no matter how good their product is, someone else may cut into their marketshare.

Apple is currently trying to use the provisions of the DMCA to prevent the Mozilla Corporation, Skype and Cydia from running their applications on iPhones on which applications which not part of the official sales can be installed.

Mozilla makes the popular Firefox browser, Skype the equally well-known chat/VoIP client, and Cydia makes an application that is equivalent to the iPhone App Store. All these potential competitors have put their weight behind a DMCA exemption request filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

CONTINUED