Linked List: March 3, 2011

Thursday, 3 March 2011

A Rare Disagreement 

Marco Arment:

The root cause for so much of the subscription ruckus, I think, isn’t that 30% number — it’s that Apple pulled the rug out from under some major apps after the fact. And unlike nearly every App Store rule change in the past, this is a major change that developers couldn’t have been reasonably expected to anticipate, and it’s not based in any practical need for the health of the Store or the platform (malware, abuse, etc.).

I’m not sure we even disagree on this. I concur that worst aspect of these new subscription policies is that something that used to be allowed now is not. It has a bait-and-switch feel to it.

Apple’s Promo Movie on How People Are Using the iPad 

As shown during yesterday’s event. So well done.

Rovio’s Vesterbacka Thanks iPhone for Enabling Angry Birds’ Success 

From an interview at GDC:

Before the iPhone, Vesterbacka recalled, some executive at a cell phone provider was the one deciding which of 27 largely identical poker games was the one to get limited space on that carrier’s mobile store. He compared the system to the Soviet Union, where some beauracrat would dictate which toothpaste was on store shelves, with little concern for quality.

The App Store is closed compared to desktop PCs, but compared to the pre-iPhone mobile market, it’s wide open.

Nielsen Numbers on the US Smartphone Market 

Interesting contrast between OS market share and handset maker market share.

The Apple Strategy Tax 

John Siracusa on Apple’s internal conflict between being a good platform host and promoting its own content services:

This tension between being a platform owner and also trying to build new businesses on that very same platform is another thing that Apple shares with Microsoft. But Microsoft is also a perfect example of how this strategy can seemingly succeed (Windows won the war for the desktop and Microsoft’s applications came to dominate the Windows platform) while blinding a company to the long-term failure scenario (a lack of competition allowed Microsoft’s products to stagnate, and the next round of innovations happened someplace other than the Windows platform).

Smart, subtle argument.

Andy Ihnatko on the iPad 2 

Andy Ihnatko:

But you kind of have to hold the iPad 2 to really get the redesign. It’s thinner by a third, plus its edges taper to a thin line of metal. It’s almost inconceivable that this thing you’re holding is a multicore tablet computer. The Xoom tablet is trim, light, and very pretty … but when you place it next to the iPad 2, it looks as though it was designed and built by angry Soviet prison labor instead of by Motorola.