Marco's article is so poorly-written, so poorly thought-out, I don't know where to begin. It's really more an article about hating Google as a whole.
Google blindness? Or blind hatred for Apple's competitors?
Some gems, though:
I think it’s unwise to use many proprietary, hard-to-replace
services in such important roles, and I think it’s downright
foolish to tie that much of your data and functionality into
proprietary services run by one company in one account that
sometimes gets disabled permanently with no warning, no
recourse, and no support.
And Apple's services aren't less proprietary? Apple doesn't tie everything to one Apple ID? Google has pretty poor support, but I've never heard of anyone having their account (unreasonably) permanently disabled.
The Google search he links to is some useless Google search on "google account locked". Here's the equivalent Apple ID search:
I could go on a side-discussion about the number of Google users vs Apple users and then compare percentages and Google results and point out that there seem to be more issues with Apple IDs than Google IDs per capita, but why bother?
What does it mean? People using both ecosystems get their accounts locked up for some reason or another.
If Apple somehow irrevocably locks out my Apple ID, which
I’ve never heard of happening, it would be inconvenient.
My contacts and calendar would temporarily stop syncing
during the 20 minutes it would take to create a new
account and point my devices to it. The biggest problem
would be losing my app and media purchases, although I
wouldn’t lose any local copies of anything*
I've never heard of someone having their Google account irrevocably locked out, either.
and there’s a phone number I can call to convince a human
to give me a transfer or credit.
Yeah, there's a number you can call for the Play Store for this purpose as well. I wish it were at the bottom of every page, but it's buried underneath a Help menu. That said, Apple's support is truly industry-leading and far better than what Google's got going. It's still not as bad or hopeless as Marco attempts to portray, though.
It’s important to maintain diversity of services.
And you can do this with Android. You don't need to use any Google services. Sure it'll badger you at first, but no more than an Apple iOS device will.
In fact, I'd say that Android is better at maintaining diversity of services. You can install an account for a wide variety of providers in the Settings app, whereas Apple forces you to stick with whatever they choose for you (Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, etc). Occasionally, they might remove a provider for you.
It’s foolish for people on either side to ignore the
other or the middle, because despite what it sometimes
looks like to geeks like us, we’re not everyone. Not
even close. Even within our world, we can’t agree on
much.
Is this self-deprecation on Marco's part?
like Paul says he does
This snippet appears repeatedly in Marco's article and strikes me as a passive-aggressive snub. The leading Apple pundits (Gruber, Marco, Dalrymple) are getting more and more hateful towards Apple's competitors and I think this betrays an underlying belief that Apple's glory days are (sadly) waning. It screams desperation. Maybe this Ellison guy is right.
I'm not a particularly big fan of Google or Apple or Microsoft, and I despise Facebook. But I still use all of their tech daily, but I'm sure as hell not going to cheer lead for any of them.
Marco is not quite the shill for Apple the Gruber is, but he's pretty close to it.
I've noticed a significant decrease in Daring Fireball posts hitting the front page in recent months, is Gruber now the new Apple shill^H^H^H^H^Hevangelist we have to deal with on HN now?
The only interesting point he makes here is that users shouldn't monoculture their services -- which I think is a good point. Then he proceeds to undermine his own argument.
I bet there are millions of Android users who'd love to use iTunes on their latest Android phone, or some other company's service, but Apple itself is responsible for not rolling these services out beyond their hardware ecosystem (acknowledging the incredibly shitty Windows ports of iTunes), thus preventing non-Apple users from become users of components of Apple's services.
But as it stands, Apple is not a good supporter of Marco's own arguments. In fact, if I don't want to use either company's services, I bet I can use more on my Android device. Hell I can even run my own mail server on my Android phone with half a dozen screen presses if I want to.
Apple propagandists have a way of acknowledging the wrongs of Apple while telling readers to not use Google's products and services:
Google says they like open things. Google had "Don't be evil" as a motto. However, Google does things that aren't open and things that are evil. That is why you shouldn't use Google's stuff.
My strawman isn't perfect, but it gets the gist of what Gruber, Marco et al say: Google tries to present itself as a better company, but they're not, so don't do business with them.
It's a noble point, but it completely glosses over Apple's equally bad behavior under the excuse that Apple, unlike Google, never pretended to be nice.
And it tries to force the conversation into a binary discussion: Apple vs. Google, iOS vs. Android which it isn't. The OP is basically the same as most of these kinds of things "<insert potentially meaningful issue>, google is bad for this issue, Apple is free from this critique" which is trite and tiresome.
I don't see anything wrong with the writing or thought process behind it. He's listing points on why he does not want to depend on Google's services. They may not mean anything to you. I have so much of my daily online activities wrapped up with a Google account, that I sometimes worry about if I lost access to them. Finding alternatives it possible, but not nearly as tidy as using Google apps.
A long time ago back in the 3GS days I was a happy iPhone user, who happened to like podcasts. There were several very nice podcast apps which I liked since they would download everything I wanted to listen to over the night and I could listen to them on my walk to work without having to boot up Windows and sync via iTunes. Then one day after an update all the podcast apps were gone from the Appstore and my phone since Apple claimed that they "Duplicated iTunes functionality". A few months later the mobile version of iTunes finally got the ability to do over-the-air synchs. And when an iTunes security update ended up installing Safari on my desktop that was the final straw.
I haven't had any experiences that bad with Google. Losing Google Reader was bad, but also made me appreciate the existence of the Data Liberation Front[1]. And I know I can install non-Google android or Ubuntu on my phone if it comes to that.
This is simply not true. There are several podcast apps in the AppStore that I'm aware of (Instacast, Downcast, Aural...) and certainly several I've never heard of. I've been using Instacast since before Apple's app came out and just recently bought Aural.
What podcast app was ever removed from the app store? There was some controversy before they started being accepted, and then problems with search in the app store. But I'm not aware of any apps that were accepted and then removed.
Gruber was quite happy arguing that Apple was "winning" back in the days of Mac OS 9, he's not going to quit any time soon (though it's amusing to contrast all his triumphalist claims e.g. the only true metric of success is profit, against what he was saying back then).
Google blindness? Or blind hatred for Apple's competitors?
Some gems, though:
And Apple's services aren't less proprietary? Apple doesn't tie everything to one Apple ID? Google has pretty poor support, but I've never heard of anyone having their account (unreasonably) permanently disabled.The Google search he links to is some useless Google search on "google account locked". Here's the equivalent Apple ID search:
https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+account+locked 26.7 million results.
Here's another:
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=apple+i... Over 29 million results.
I could go on a side-discussion about the number of Google users vs Apple users and then compare percentages and Google results and point out that there seem to be more issues with Apple IDs than Google IDs per capita, but why bother?
What does it mean? People using both ecosystems get their accounts locked up for some reason or another.
I've never heard of someone having their Google account irrevocably locked out, either. Yeah, there's a number you can call for the Play Store for this purpose as well. I wish it were at the bottom of every page, but it's buried underneath a Help menu. That said, Apple's support is truly industry-leading and far better than what Google's got going. It's still not as bad or hopeless as Marco attempts to portray, though. And you can do this with Android. You don't need to use any Google services. Sure it'll badger you at first, but no more than an Apple iOS device will.In fact, I'd say that Android is better at maintaining diversity of services. You can install an account for a wide variety of providers in the Settings app, whereas Apple forces you to stick with whatever they choose for you (Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, etc). Occasionally, they might remove a provider for you.
Is this self-deprecation on Marco's part? This snippet appears repeatedly in Marco's article and strikes me as a passive-aggressive snub. The leading Apple pundits (Gruber, Marco, Dalrymple) are getting more and more hateful towards Apple's competitors and I think this betrays an underlying belief that Apple's glory days are (sadly) waning. It screams desperation. Maybe this Ellison guy is right.I'm not a particularly big fan of Google or Apple or Microsoft, and I despise Facebook. But I still use all of their tech daily, but I'm sure as hell not going to cheer lead for any of them.
Edit: Fixed broken copy-pasted links, thanks anonymoushn.