Hey Apple, iBite Me!
"A new iJunk is out, end original development now, development for this device is all that is left to do in human existance!" That's the philosophy of many consumer gadget geeks this week. Its the long tiring trend that has caused burn out amongst the many who work toward innovation and inspire ideas in ways consumers don't bother to imagine. Why? Apple (or Crapple) is launching another device to tweens this week. In the build up is the ficitious hype, which seems to be drivin largely by media corporation USA Today.
On March 31st of 2010 USA Today looked at the growing popularity of apps. Now apps is short for applications which have been around since computers started to become business and consumer friendly back... well ever. Do you remember the old IBM PC's before hard drives were standard? Each PC came with 2 5-1/4" disk drive. The first or A: was for the DOS diskette. DOS? Yup, Disk Operating System. The world of black monitors and green text. Did you want to crunch numbers? No problem, insert the Lotus 1-2-3 diskette into drive B:. Look, an app!
After high school graduation during my time as an undergrad my first Windows operating system was Windows for Workgroups, version 3.11. Remember when instead of everything being explorer you had managers? Wanted to browse for files on your disks: there was an app called File Manager. Wanted to connect or monitor your printers? You used an app called Print Manager. There was no task bar or start button back in those days. To open your apps you used the Program Manager. From there were your apps to make bitmaps, word documents, spreadsheets, or even connect to a dial up service.
Apps have been around for a long time. Anyone who thinks they were invented back in 2007 is just fooling themselves. What happened in 2007? Basically a company called Apple admitted defeat in the computer market and shifted into their financially stable consumer device market. After paying Cisco Systems massive rights to use the name shared by there IP based phone system, Apple released iPhone. In the true perspective of the technology timeline, all the iPhone marks is a step in the evolution of a smart phone market that already existed. To understand that we need to look at early 2000's.
Smart phones are the logical evolution of devices known as PDA, which stand for Palmtop Digital Assistant. The goal was to put a tiny computer in the palm of your hands. There were two competing players: Palm and Microsoft. Each offered standard calendar, e-mail, and other organization applications (there's those apps again) but Microsoft started to take the lead with there 4th OS release of Windows CE. Based off the 2000 approach there was a start menu, mini task bar and status bar always present. By plugging your device into your PC via the USB cable you could install any application you wanted on the device. With Palm now flopping around like a fish out of water, Microsoft started to take the next step and integrate cell phone capabilities into their PDAs, thus creating the term Smart Phone. Palm at this point conceded and starting building phone devices that ran Windows Mobile OS. I have in my office the Palm Trio which has built in Wi-Fi, touch screen and full mobile keyboard. Keep in mind, we're standing in the year 2002. Thus the invention of the smart phone and the need for apps began with Microsoft.
A funny thing happened on their way to bringing smart phones main stream. Microsoft went nuts promoting Windows Mobile version 5. Ads were placed in magazines and airports showing the hand held devices running Microsoft Office programs and listing their features. But with devices running $300 to $500 each they focused on selling to business people for business needs. They also, in some cases, shrunk the screens to make the devices smaller so while your fingers would still work the touch screen, you had better accuracy using a stylus. Apple, came along and in their traditional way, removed functionality. Their up and coming iPhone-OS would remove the clipboard, and its associated copy and paste functionality. You might think that would be a problem sharing data between apps. Don't worry, Apple removed multi-tasking. Multitasking is a staple in operating systems. Unix lead the way and Microsoft made it a selling point when they released Windows 95 back in the year 1995 (version 4.0) Apple removed one requirement that worked in their favor: the need for a stylus. In doing so, they needed to recreate user interface controls (or widgets) to be more friendly to adult sized fingers. Apple then decided to do one thing: not compete with Microsoft. Instead of targeting business users, they marketed to consumers and Surprise! People rather play then work.
Today, Apple appears to have all but officially left the computer business. Long gone are the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials that never once showed a Mac computer. Also gone are the discussions of the awesomeness that is Snow-Leopard (the Mac OS built on top of Unix). The final proof is that their latest device, the iPad, isn't running Snow-Leopard, or Spotted-Leopard, or Big Smelly Kitty, what ever their next OS release will be called. Instead it is running iPhone OS. But Apple exiting the computer business has opened up two new concerns which, as time passes, could spell a great deal of trouble for many people.
The first concern is the mis-use of the tool. The iPhone has introduced ways for apps running on it can be of great use, such as maps or the ability to look up restaurants where you are, or find a hotel to spend a night, and I could make use of airline provided apps for the occasional business travel (I use road trips for personal getaways). But this heavy use of apps is causing an effect on consumers just as Java has for washed up programmers: you can now function with just half a brain. The people documented in the USA Today article use apps for everything from an alarm clock, to reading books, to getting the weather. Seriously, what is wrong with looking out a window? As people down load apps with the frequency of their favorite songs, the tool is becoming mis-used. If there is a cell phone outage, or zero coverage (which is the norm for AT&T) how would you function? Think about it this way: A GPS is a great tool to have to help you get to a location you have not visited yet. There are people though who continue to use GPS navigation to get them to the same location for a tenth time. Seriously! At what point do you not remember the way and decide this is the proper way to exist? What happened to these people?
We don't have to look to far for an answer. In the expression "life imitates art" we see a 1990s Sci-Fi show gave us a glimpse of a group of people that required constant connection and lack free will: the Borg Collective. Once you live your entire day making decisions on what a downloaded App designed to sell ad space tells you, you're assimilated. You will do what the iPhone apps tell you when it tells you. When I'm at the airport waiting for a fight, I'll wander into the book store and flip through magazines looking for new things. The Borg will sit on a chair and stare into a small screen only to find what the almighty iTunes deems appropriate. How about the human contact? Wasting time at the airport is a great time to grab a drink at the bar and chat with other travelers.
Which brings the second concern, the gatekeeper. To get your app in use by the Borg you must buy through iTunes. Which means you have to certify your app with iTunes and in more cases than not, must not be in direct competition with an existing app already on the store. As a result, you get apps that have no functional purpose such as the iFart, an app whose sole purpose is to reproduce the sound of passing gas. Sadly, 70% of apps available fall into this category. The sadder part, is in terms of other Smart Phone platforms this is the model being choosen. I could have sworn by not allowing people to install apps from other Vendors or using your platform to contribute to a monopoly is what got Microsoft sued over Internet Explorer on Windows in the first place. Perhaps it is time for Apple to face the music and pay hundreds of millions in an anti-trust lawsuit. For the remaining 30% of available apps, the development community seems to have forgotten that these wireless devices obtain their information from "the cloud", a platform highly being promoted by Google, who also happens to be a direct competitor to Apple with the Android OS. While consumers interact with apps and are most familiar with how those work, they aren't looking at the big picture, which is client-server. This means apps are merely the front end to something bigger, more powerful, the almighty server farm. Which means forgetting about quality programmers who perform data-mining, load balancing, server development and cloud to cloud security limits the powerfulness of future app development which in turn will hurt everyone. The Borg may not notice but those who respect the tool will loose functionality they have come to expect.
The frightening part is the media hyping that the launch of the iPad spells the end of netbooks, notebooks and even desktop computers. No longer do you need to be annoyed with the inconvenience of a physical keyboard, or need a device that allows you to do editing. Why have a device that allows you to write a book, or make that art project in Photoshop? The Borg is content with just viewing, all for a society who shuts of imagination or ideas of how to make things better. Youth who rather communicate by keyboard and social network sites instead of the mall or local hot dog stand are encourage to continue their anti-social, anti-imaginative development. The Borg will promote that instead of learning something new, just sit by and hope that some day an app will come along that will teach the skills you are looking for. The reality is, there is no app that will cure cancer. There is no app that will get you to work (physically). Engineers, designers, artists, writers, students, teachers will all need power platforms to continue to innovate and powerful backbones to remain connected and share ideas. For these people the iPad is of no use. The Borg will want to assimilate and rid the world of all technology that isn't iPhone or iPad. In this case resistance can not be futile, but is necessary for human survival. These devices are merely tools and the apps that run on them are there to help make life easier, not replace life itself. Use them responsibly. Do not use them to replace human contact or even human thought. And for you Apple fans reading this I want you to take away this important lesson: remember that these devices exist today because of the innovation and visions of a company called Microsoft.
Now if you think my zero interest in owning either of these devices is radical than so be it! I'm proud to say my interest in full out computing systems is so extreme it heads straight over the edge.
