Evil Is a Turn-Off
From Paul Graham’s fantastic piece on the iPhone App Store:
The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they’ve ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.
How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that’s just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak
I popped the SIM card out of my iPhone last week and put it in back in its old home, an aging (but loyal) Motorola Pebl. A pointless gesture, yes — Apple doesn’t give a shit if I use their phone, especially since I haven’t shackled myself to their reprehensible partner in crime — but, then again, it’s not really a gesture. Apple’s App Store policies have been making my skin crawl lately, and using their phone has become genuinely unpleasant. It’s no fun any more.
And the bad feelings are leaking over into the rest of the Applescape. I got rid of an AppleTV recently, and for the first time in a long time feel no real desire to own any of their increasingly lovely computers. Evil is a turn-off. Graham again:
But the other reason programmers are fussy, I think, is that evil begets stupidity. An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work. And it’s not fun for a smart person to work in a place where the best ideas aren’t the ones that win. I think the reason Google embraced “Don’t be evil” so eagerly was not so much to impress the outside world as to inoculate themselves against arrogance.
It would be one thing if Apple was just screwing over its own ecosystem — but what if this horrible software distribution model leaks out into the wider world, and we have to start buying all our stuff through dictatorial, single-channel gatekeepers? It would stunt the industry, hurt software, throttle innovation.
Anyway. It’s weird rooting for Apple to fail, but I sincerely hope they do, and fail hard. The iPhone’s a more or less perfect device, but perfect is no substitute for good.
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