By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Open systems, open society

Apple’s attempt to ban a Pulitzer-winning cartoonist from its iTunes Store is an extension of the same mindset that led it to keep Adobe’s Flash software off its new generation of closed devices — the iPhone, the iPod touch and the iPad. And it shows that Steve Jobs and company are poorly cast in their role as a savior of the struggling news business. Or so I write in the Guardian.

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6 Comments

  1. Mike Stucka

    And no one disputes that the company has given us the smoothest, sexiest integration of hardware and software available.

    Oh, I’ll take a shot at that one … literally, I wished to take a shot at my wife’s iBook G4. On my laptop, and almost any other laptop, you can get the hard drive carrier out with a single screw. Take a look at the smooth, sexy de- integration of the Apple POS. Next step: “but it looked good.”

    ‘Course, there’s the owners of the iPod, like my cousin who’s had four replacements for the same model. He wasn’t alone.

  2. Mike Stucka

    Video showing the aftermath. I’ll shut up now.

  3. Steve Stein

    Here is an interesting, possibly ironic counterpoint from Ken Auletta about Apple’s and Amazon’s competing views about book publishing: “Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business?”

    Is one more true than the other? Are they both? I’m still reading.

    But Dan’s article (and other recent posts) makes me think of net neutrality. Here is Apple, with total control over content for your iPhone/Pad. What if Comcast or Verizon made the same decision about what came over your internet connection? Is it really that different?

    • Dan Kennedy

      @Steve: Very similar, except that Apple has a lot less power than Comcast or Verizon.

  4. Bill Rirchotte

    I may have already posted this but I can’t see it. The App has been approved and is available now in the App store.

  5. Aaron Read

    Scott Adams once wrote that marketing is like a wooden hamburger. If you put enough garnish on it, sooner or later SOMEone is going to swallow it.

    Apple has a TERRIBLE track record of being the savior of anything other than Steve Jobs’ ego.

    BTW, in a somewhat-related field, check out Facebook’s new attempts to screw over its users by selling out your privacy to make Facebook money.

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