Philoking.com

This weekend I embarked on Major Suckage. I had outgrown the OS drive on my laptop again, and decided that it was much safer to reinstall my entire system from scratch rather than just clone my hard drive for the 3rd time.

I ordered a 750GB 7200rpm drive from Other World Computing and when I got home from work Friday I began the process. I immediately realized a huge problem with OS X Lion as an upgrade.

I had to install Snow Leopard, download 3GB of updates to get it up to App Store compatibility, then immediately upgrade it to Lion.

That’s right, my goal was a clean start and before I installed my first application, it was already upgraded. Grrrr.

I get it was only $30, but I was really missing the disc and only on principle. I am sure the upgrade went smoothly and all is well, but I’d rather not start a new computer build with outdated stuff potentially scattered on a brand new drive.

This laptop is used for music and video production and by the time I got everything back to status quo I had spent 20 hours and reduced a 750GB hard drive to 370GB without a single bit of my own data on it. Yikes.

I am ok with delivering the upgrade through the app store, but there needs to be some way to go to Apple.com and download a burnable or thumb bootable ISO you can use to install from scratch. Asking a user to recover from a hard drive failure or data swap by having to install, update then upgrade is more hassle than it should be. Agree?

What’s that you say? It can’t be possible! 9% market share in PCs! Symbian has them crushed in market share in the smart phone market. There’s no monopoly here! I am afraid so…

In economics, a monopoly exists when a specified individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it. Monopolies are thus characterized by a lack of economic competition for the good or service that they provide and a lack of viable substitute goods. – From Wikipedia

I am, of course, NOT a lawyer, have no legal training, and this is purely a common sense interpretation of the law. The situation occurred when Apple opened up the iPhone to external developers. They created a marketplace that allows 3rd parties to develop Applications for a platform, the iPhone. If Apple had not decided to create it’s own applications for that platform, it might be a different story. But in this particular case, Apple is now competing with other developers on the iPhone. This is no different than if they decided the would not allow Firefox to work on OS X.

It doesn’t matter that Apple doesn’t charge for these applications, ask Microsoft. Bundling, Tying, all of these practices come into play when you have a system, that you allow others to develop on, and you prevent them from creating applications that compete with your own for competitive reasons. (Google Voice anyone?)

I am afraid that when this comes up, and more high profile applications get rejected because they duplicate (a nice way to say compete with) Apple’s bundled software, the castle of Apple might start to shake under the weight of it’s own defenses.

I am sure they feel quite good about their place right now, but if history has proven anything, even Microsoft’s money doesn’t do much good when fighting the government. And if you thought Bill Gates was smug answering questions to the house committee, wait until Steve Jobs shoes up in sneakers and a turtle neck.

This is not a rant, it’s a legitimate beef with the numbers Apple is representing. The other night my wife and I were playing with our iPhones and downloading apps. I said to her, “you know, for 10,000 applications, there sure doesn’t seem to be that much to download.

I was having that conversation with a friend at work today and I said, “seriously, search checkers and see how many checkers games come back, I bet it’s at least a half dozen.” I was way off, it was almost 30! To Do resulted in over 20. Wikipedia another 25 and movies was a whopping 50 applications that did nearly the same exact thing. To be fair, a lot of this is the paid vs. free versions of the same application, but let’s dice this a bit.

The average of 50,30,20 and 25 is 25 and to be really generous to Apple, we’ll divide that in half in case ALL of them have free and paid versions, and even round down to be extra nice.. so 12. That whacks 10,000 to about 833.

I am not saying there are only 833 unique applications on the App Store (Nor am I saying there isn’t less) I am just saying that navigating the iTunes store for apps is getting ridiculous. Explain why they have no problem allowing the 30th version of Checkers, but we still haven’t gotten the Nine Inch Nails application that promises to be very unique.

Fuzzy math man, Fuzzy math……