Sunday, January 14, 2007

Steve Jobs, the iPhone and open platforms

Dan Farber pointing to  a Newsweek interview quotes Steve Jobs as saying "You don't want your phone to be an open platform"
 
Jobs    may have a valid point.  He continues: "You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up."

"Now, just how open is Steven Jobs?", you may ask.

Steven Levy offers a very interesting insight in "The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture and Coolness".

In the Chapter on Download (page 99 in my copy),  Levy notes: "Jobs wasn't used to someone else writing on his whiteboard".

I guess that should only be viewed with mild amusement. I'd like to think though that Jobs is a reasonable believer in openness, peering, sharing and acting globally. Of course reasonable could mean different things to different people.

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