Apple lock-in of the day

Oh, good grief:

Last week, in a stroke of breathtaking arrogance, Apple redefined “web apps” to mean sites designed for a single hardware platform

Well done Microsoft...NOT!

Before the vote on the MS OOXML document standard in ISO, a lot of countries suddenly joined to be able to vote. Nearly all of them voted in favour of OOXML, a clear sign that Microsoft played a major role. As most people know, it didn't help them since the voted ended up being no anyway. It doesn't end there though, since all these new members only joined to vote on this one standard, they have not voted since. This creates a big unfortunate problem:

The result is that a very important committee has, in the words of its Secretariat Manager in frequent pleas to the non-responsive members, "ground to a halt."

Microsoft has repeatedly said that they care a lot about standards, so Microsoft - please fix this big mess you've made!

DRM - more choices for the consumers!

The content industry keeps saying that DRM (also known as CRAP or C.R.A.P.) is good for consumers because it creates more choice for us consumers. here is the latest "choice": To be able to play that new BD movie you just bought, you might need to upgrade your players firmware - if you are so lucky that the manufaturer has made an updated firmware available, otherwise you just out of luck!

How do you do a firmware update? Here is a bit of info:

Many of these players don't have Ethernet ports, as the Blu-ray spec doesn't require them. Updating the firmware on these units involves downloading an .ISO from the web site, unpacking it, burning it onto a CD-R or CD-RW, putting the disc in the player, rebooting, following the prompts, and hoping that all goes well.

I'm pretty sure my mom and dad wouldn't have a clue and would be out of luck until I made a visit and did it for them.

It is a fantastic business decision they've made: Let us annoy our honest customers the most.

Why I'm not an Apple customer

Mark has written a nice blog post that resembles my feelings about Apple pretty well:

I don’t understand this continuing obsession with buying things that you need to break before they do what you want. It’s not just the iPhone; people did the exact same thing with the AppleTV too. Primarily to add support for other video codecs, like DivX and XviD. Why? (No seriously, why? I bought a Philips DVP 5960 for $60. It’s a DivX-certified DVD player with a USB port. Out of the box, it’ll play a DVD-R full — or a thumb drive full — of AVI files.) I thought the big draw for Apple hardware was that “It Just Works.” By breaking it, you must know you’re giving up the “Just Works” factor, so what’s left? Rounded corners?

I do understand why many people like Apple! They do make some great products, OS X is very nice (based on the quite limited time I've used it) and much of their hardware is very nice and their design team is doing a great job! It's just such a shame that they are so obsessed with locking their customers to their hardware and software. Considering how great their products in general are, I'm pretty sure they would sell even more if they opened up. At least I'd be a potential customer :-)