And Apple sells 99.5% of all mobile applications. Sounds like the makings of a monopoly to me. Why does everybody buy Windows? Because that’s where the apps are. They gained this monopoly through skill and the incompetence of their competitors.

Which is part of the problem. They earned their current position. We can admire that, and yet at the same time acknowledge and fight their evil.

The real story of Apple and Open Source is that Open Source is about enabling anyone to control the technology that’s available to them, whereas Apple is about turning computers into appliances–that is, closed devices intended to be used “as is” rather than programmed and customized. My first MP3 player was a Linux box; Apple turned the “music player” category into something completely different.

The reason I have a MacBook is that on the one hand, a lot of the user experience is superior to anything Windows or Linux have come up with. On the days when I don’t have time to geek out, and I just need things to work, Apple is good for that. But at the same time, I can compile unix software from source, and the modified BSD operating system is a lot friendlier to me than Windows. Apple has learned how to seduce geeks by offering the best of both worlds–commercial and Open Source–rather than a bad compromise.

Right now, I’m not as bothered by the App store restrictions as many people. I figure that when you buy an iPhone, you have two choices: you either decide to go commercial, and treat the iPhone as an appliance, or you go geek and “jailbreak” it.

But I must admit that the iPad could make things a little scarier: IF these things catch on, we could be going from a world where your phone is an appliance–which it always was–to a world where your *computer* is an appliance. I would agree that this is NOT a good thing.

However, at the moment Apple’s share of computers is still relatively small, and if anything, the iPad’s success will do the same as the iPhone’s did: just create momentum for an existing category of devices, ie. tablets and netbooks. We’ll see a lot more netbooks becoming tablets, and they’ll be much cheaper than the iPad.

So for now I’m just hoping that the fight between Adobe and Apple could benefit the consumer, as many corporate fights do.

It’s especially ironic because Apple could have killed Flash quite easily if it wanted to. Apple’s refusal to endorse Ogg Theora was the only reason that Theora did not become a mandated codec for HTML5 video.

But of course, that’s a minor evil compared to Apple’s refusal to allow third party applications on the iPad and the iPhone. The phone is the next generation of computing platform. We’re all familiar with the harm that Microsoft inflicted on the good of mankind through their monopolistic control of the microcomputer platform. Apple has proven themselves to be much more heavy-handed and greedy in their control of the smartphone platform.

Yet Apple is praised by geeks, not condemned. One knew that one was selling ones soul when one went to work for Microsoft or indirectly supporting the Microsoft platform. Supporting the Apple platform should be viewed in the same respect.

I hate Flash, perhaps much more than you do. I use Linux, so Flash regularly impacts my web experience. But in this case, the enemy or my enemy is my friend, and I hope it’s Flash that impacts Apple.