Will today’s innovations stop future innovations?

“The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you — and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy. ”

In theory, yes, but in actuality, there are highly-restrictive EULA’s, and licenses which can be set to expire. Remember.

The vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy

Huh?

Microsoft has notoriously made its competitor’s products unuseable; has everyone forgotten “Windows ain’t done until Lotus won’t run?”

Apple are still largely irrelevant – they’re a luxury goods firm who make their money by selling value-added goods to consumers who can afford them. They can maintain an iron grip on their App Store because, for now, there isn’t much competition, but that situation won’t last forever. Apple have first-mover advantage in the super-smartphone marketplace, but that’s all.

They once seemed poised to control the personal computer market, but in reality ended up simply controlling a handful of highly visible niches (publishing, graphics and, to a lesser extent, audio recording). The iPhone is the device of choice for people who ‘need’ advanced internet connectivity on their phone, but that market is still pretty small compared to the global one, and by the time everyone wants net connectivity, Apple are going to have a lot more competition.

Yeah, the piece is not very convincing. “If the market settles into a handful of gated cloud communities…” – well, why should it? Judging by the fate of AOL (for example), it’s not too likely. “The cloud” is dynamic, entry barrier is low.

So is xcode as easy to use as Visual C++?

I can’t compare the two, sorry. It’s easy enough to follow along with a tutorial and make yourself a gadget that performs some simple operation. Sharper folks than I will have a better answer.

The article makes (and more or less conflates) arguments that both personal freedoms and personal data are at added risk because of the cloud. However it’s debatable whether the examples it cites really relate specifically to “the cloud” and not just to networked computing in general.

The App Store and the way Apple controls it is not really cloud technology. Guessing someone’s password and using it to access documents stored online isn’t a new cloud-enabled form of privacy violation.

The motivation for cloud computing is to decouple innovative web sites and services from the provision of the complex IT infrastructure required for a scaled-up web app for a large audience. The idea is to make servers and data abstract, fungible and replicable as much as possible. Removing such a large chunk of the administrative burden will hasten the pace of innovation at the main venues of the internet, not hold it back.

Well, I have always felt that Apple in Microsoft’s market position would be a far more terrible result. The companies instincts on the need to stifle competitors are even more obscene. Fortunately, this policy makes it extremely difficult for them to remain a market leader.

It’s too bad that Zittrain’s potentially important point fell afoul of the fact that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about Apple on the Internet.

Well, I for one found the article kinda interesting, so thank you for sharing! I’m neither a techno-nerd nor an Apple-fiend – my nerdiness resides elsewhere – so I can’t comment on the finer points of programming or Apple hardware, but the gist of Zittrain’s article makes sense to me: once-unacceptable breaches of privacy or personal property rights may become more commonplace as our goods become less tangible (or are removed from our immediate possession).

At the very least this would seem to accord with a general fear regarding the huge volumes of personal information and assets now held in digital form – especially those that are directly in the ‘cloud’, or at least intimately connected with some cloud-like service provider (Apple’s iStore or whatever, Amazon and it’s e-books).

I mean, I keep a lot of stuff on gmail, for example, and the only thing that keeps me at ease is my trust in google (there’s a dollar bill slogan) and my blind assumption that the safeguards necessary to protect my stuff exist, and are exercised.

re: the inappropriateness of the ‘cloud’ metaphor applied to Apple/Amazon, the distinction Zittrain makes is this:

…if your favorite music is rented or authorized from an online subscription service rather than freely in your custody

Where ‘favourite music’ might be replaced with ‘e-book’, ‘iPhone app’, etc. My emphasis on ‘or authorized’. There is a leap here, sure, but not an unreasonable one.

The issue I suppose is whether the Kindle/iStore services count as ‘online subscription services’ – my knowledge regarding these things is negligible. When you purchase an e-book/iPhone app, are they downloaded directly onto the Kindle/iPhone hard-drive/memory? If so, then perhaps the ‘cloud’ metaphor is inappropriate, since those goods would be ‘freely in [one’s] custody’. If instead they rely on some kind of permanent access to whichever book/app – hosted elsewhere – then I can’t see a problem, conceptually, with lumping those services into the ‘cloud’.

bq. With a little effort and political will, we could solve these problems. Companies could be required under fair practices law to allow your data to be released back to you with just a click so that you can erase your digital footprints or simply take your business (and data) elsewhere.

This doesn’t seem to take account of the way the cloud crosses jurisdictional boundaries. A lot of my data is now in the hands of US-based companies, and yet I’m in the UK. Of course there’s no reason why providers of internet services shouldn’t locate themselves in Liberia or Panama in order to avoid regulation, if they want to.

“The issue I suppose is whether the Kindle/iStore services count as ‘online subscription services’ – my knowledge regarding these things is negligible. When you purchase an e-book/iPhone app, are they downloaded directly onto the Kindle/iPhone hard-drive/memory? If so, then perhaps the ‘cloud’ metaphor is inappropriate, since those goods would be ‘freely in [one’s] custody’. If instead they rely on some kind of permanent access to whichever book/app – hosted elsewhere – then I can’t see a problem, conceptually, with lumping those services into the ‘cloud’.”

Well, look at the case recently of Amazon deleting copies of books (ironically enough, including 1984) that were stored on people’s Kindles. I don’t have one, so I don’t know if online access is necessary (presumably not, or it would render them useless underground or abroad) , but clearly if you do go online with one, your personal control over your stored data is not complete.

Which argument, by the way, is balderdash.

Substance, the thing that’s so annoying about the term “cloud computing” is that the metaphor of a cloud is a long-standing image for depicting the Internet, or any large network (individuals connect to the edges of the cloud, and nobody, maybe even the network administrators, cares what goes on inside). But “cloud computing” is now a buzzword. The Times printed a marketing analysis piece a few months ago, which I can’t find now, solemnly analyzing the difference between cloud computing and whatever it used to be called.

Does Google’s Chrome really meet the criteria to be called cloud computing, given the hairsplitting of IBM’s marketers? I kind of doubt it, but as it happens I’m temperamentally unsuited for understanding marketeers’ particular version of hairsplitting. So, as you say, why fasten on cloud computing itself?

The iPhone has a “remote kill app” feature which is under Apple’s control. Does it matter where the app is physically running, if that is the case? This is bad enough. But there’s worse. The “remote kill” feature is what security experts commonly call a “back door”–a hole in the device’s security. There’s every reason to think that J. Well-paid-mafia Hacker can break in to your iPhone and kill any app.

BTW, the subject that’s being addressed is might be more broadly called “the ethics of ubiquitous computing.”