Monday 1st November 2010
The one thing that I worried about (aloud) after the success of the iPhone / iPad / iOS, was that Apple might decide that Mac / Mac OS-X might be more profitable if it were similarly consumer-ized.
I can see a future where Apple separates its product lines into "consumer" and "professional" divisions, with so called "professional" devices being more and more rarified, more and more geared towards providing iOS developer tools, and becoming more and more expensive.
I'm now fairly certain that Apple actively doesn't want to work with anybody else. Its closed ecosystem is very profitable, thank you very much, and as long as it doesn't get too big a market share nobody is ever going to challenge it on anti-trust type matters; all Apple needs to do is keep a comfortable < 50% of market by continually pricing itself out of the lower end of the market, and it can carry on locking its other users in.
With this in mind, an open, low cost, interopable and unrestricted computing platform is pretty much in the opposite direction to Apple's current strategy.
I'm worried. I only became an Apple user a couple of years ago, and have invested quite a lot in their tech in our business, but I'm now thinking I need to start moving away. Quickly.
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