There Is a Flip Side

Dave Winer, on trying to convince Joe Hewitt to switch to Android:

Anyway, he thinks the iPhone is great. He doesn’t want to use Android. But I want him to use it, for the same reason I use it. Which is the title of this piece.

Right now it’s the only open source mobile OS that has a chance against iOS. If there is no alternative to iOS then Apple will have exclusive control over what makes it to market. That is a future none of us should want to live in.

The better iOS is relative to Android, the more you have to worry about.

I enjoyed this piece a lot. To me, this is an honest and reasonable perspective.

But, to quote Neil McCauley, there is a flip side to that coin. Winer’s perspective is that Apple is the bigger threat. A different perspective would be that Google is the bigger threat, and that using Apple products is a way to better protect our privacy and personal information.

Fear of Apple is about losing control over the software on our computers. Fear of Google is about losing control over our privacy.

Me, I use an iPhone simply because I think it’s the best. But it fits with which company I’m more worried about, too.

★ Monday, 19 December 2011