Poisoned Apple: iPhones and Steve Jobs — Disney Revisited?

In many ways Apple is the Teflon technology company.  While Bill Gates is often cast as a slightly dorky Darth Vader and Microsoft as the evil Empire , his counterpart Steve Jobs is often portrayed as a yuppie guru and Apple as an almost spiritual enterprise. These simple caricatures have always ignored such details as Gates’s initiatives to bring vaccines to poor Africans which are, as of yet, without answer from Jobs.  The Apple iPhone takes us through the looking glass to a place called Disney World.  Our adventure may not be magical, but it will add additional perspective to the above oft-recited caricatures.

The Safari web browser on iPhone and iPod Touch is rapidly gain market share amongst mobile web users.  The gain one comes despite the fact that the iPhone is an extra-ordinarily closed system.  All software developed though Apple’s software development kit must be distributed through Apple, which then takes a 30 percent cut.  Software development kits released for other operating systems do not require the developers to relinquish a cut.   Apple is already apparently making editorial decisions, rejecting a “Pull my Finger” application.  This system makes Bill Gates’s ,foul murderer of Netscape, look like Linus Torvalds.

Before we contemplate this Darkness at Dawn, we should consider who brought us to this potentiality. The character of Jobs is uniquely amenable to the Disney empire where he spends some little portion of his time. For, if the God’s time need not be bothered by the fact that Jobs and Walt Disney shared some years together in this benighted world, Jobs could very well be Disney re-incarnate.

Though the Disney World is often portrayed as the embodiment often the most fantastic dreams of Disney, the reality is that the project was born of rather meaner thoughts.   Though Disneyland was an enormous economic success, there was a defect, a defect so dire that ate away at Disney’s very soul.  Disneyland was located in the megaopolis that included Los Angeles.   As hotels owned by others sprouted around Disneyland, Disney became obsessed with the lost income.  In the end, those who don’t count themselves amongst the eccentric believers in cryogenics, say that despair over this lost income killed Disney– well that . . . and lung cancer.

Disney World was envisioned as a Magical Kingdom where all of Disney’s competitors were kept safely away. Nothing exists in or near Disney World without the express permission of the Disney corporation.  Eventually Disney World reached such a state of totalitarian perfection that it was the only place in America that Nikita Khrushchev, Никита Сергеевич Хрущёв, wanted to see on his trip to America.  It is one of the Cold War’s poignant little disappointments that this wish was not granted. In defiance of those self-regulating market fundamentalists, who say that monopolies contain the seeds of their own destruction, Disney World has been an unrelenting cash cow that has indeed been for many years the salvation of the Disney corporation.

This same relentless drive to hold onto every possible cent that is produced by the magic of the corporation’s flagship has always been evident in Steve Jobs. From the beginning Jobs was the butler of the Apple corporation.  If anything Apple died, Jobs either did the deed himself or was an active conspirator.   Whether it was the Apple II line, the Newton, the licensing of OS X to other computer manufacturers or any one of many other worthwhile projects, Jobs consistently opposed anything that would threaten to leak the slightest cent of profit generated from his babies, the Mac computer and the Next OS.

In fact many think that this very obsession was pivotal in Microsoft’s rise to dominance in the OS market.  But if these doubts existed in Jobs mind he has never evidenced them.   He rebuffed partnership with Real Networks to increase the music provided on the iPod.  And most recently he refused to allow Adobe flash or Java onto his iPhone or iPod touch.

Right now the effects of these decisions are mixed.  Perhaps the greatest threat to open source desktop OSs, and the lesser portable OS’s has been YouTube. Like it or loath it, no operating system is going to be a true replacement for Windows or OS X without access to YouTube.  The success of YouTube proves that when Gates placed Microsoft’s bets on the operating system and Apple placed its bets on the media streaming technology, Apple made the right choice.  A user may use which ever browser he chooses for the vast majority of sites.  But the streaming companies often have a monopoly on their particular contact.  I personally forswore Windows only to find that radio dramas on BBC made my dependence on the Realplayer complete.  The OS I was then using did not support the player and I quickly found myself by back in the Windows fold.

If Jobs had been slightly less keen to soak the content providers he might have had the monopoly on media streamers and have leveraged this monopoly into a much larger piece of the OS market.   Yet something of the sort is still guiding Jobs current plans.   The second part of Jobs actions are much more sinister to the open source community.    His refusal to allow Sun’s Java onto the iPhone is a dreadful strike at the heart of the open source movement and is part of a coordinated attack on Java which also includes divorcing Java from OS X.

Despite what Jobs’ disparaging remarks, Java is of vital importance to the open source community. As BASIC’s successor as the interpreted language of choice by the every man, it is superior in every way.   Unlike BASIC which has been the mother of bad voluminous bad code and bad programing habits, Java actually teaches good programming habits.  Further Java presents a true multi-platform solution for small specialized programs.  While misuse of Java does indeed waste so much CPU time that it poses a serous global warming threat, the ability to create small OS  and CPU independent code makes the total cost of running a multiple OS workplace much smaller than it might otherwise be.  Which is almost certainly why Microsoft itself took a swing at Java.

It is not at all hard to believe that the Wintel duopoly could be replaced by Google with it’s search engine monopoly and a media streaming company.  This duopoly would have far more influence over our lives than its predecessor.   The iPhone is the clearest evidence that Jobs intends an Apple product to be half of the duopoly. So, next time you look at your iPhone remember it is trying to take you to a magical kingdom.  It may be a happy place, but it certainly isn’t a free one.

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