Zittrain vs. Apple: What About the User Experience?

Tech.pinions’ Steve Wildstrom comments that Harvard Law School Prof. Jonathan Zittrain doesn’t like the iPhone or the iPad, or much of anything about the modern app economy, noting that in an article for MIT’s Technology Review, Zittrain bemoans the loss of a golden age of software openness, when anyone could write and run software for an operating system, and up popped an endless assortment of spreadsheets, word processors, instant messengers, Web browsers, email, and games, and that in the dystopian future Zittrain sees, an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other means the Apples, Googles, and Microsofts of the world will control what you can do with your PCs, phones, and tablets and we’ll all be the worse for it.

However, while Wildstrom acknowledges that Prof. Zittrain is a very smart and witty guy, he thinks the professor is missing something very important – user experience, which Wildsrtom characterizes as “horrible” back in Zittrain’s glory days of computing freedom, observing that the many millions of people who have bought iPhones and iPads have chosen to cede to Apple the right to to choose what software their devices can run in exchange for a superior user experience.

That’s obviously what’s happening, although some of us would dispute that the user experience in the iOS/iCloud walled garden is in fact qualitatively better, at least for content producers and other power users.

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