02.14.12
Apple May Have High Market Cap, But Linux is Far Ahead
Apple: a brand to love and to hate.
Summary: Remarks on Apple’s status and the growth of Linux, which is a multi-company titan
THE quality of Apple products is not as high as perceived by some. This is not just a hardware issue but a software issue too. As The Inquirer put it last week:
SELLER OF SHINY TOYS Apple has pulled its Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3 delta update after its legendary quality control procedures failed to discover that it causes applications to crash.
Last week Apple released a large security update for its two most recent operating systems, but it seems both have pretty big bugs forcing Apple to withdraw the updates. First up was Apple’s delta update for Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3 which had to be pulled after users complained of applications crashing, with Apple now recommending that users download a 1.3GB file instead, avoiding the Mac OS X Software Update facility.
This is the sort of quality issues that Apple supporters tend to brush under the carpet and IT professionals take as a sign that, while Apple makes decent toys, it is not suitable for advanced uses or work. Quoting a new opinion piece:
News Flash: Apple Products Are Not IT Friendly
Last week, we talked about the impact of the bring your own device phenomenon on IT. It’s become accepted practice in many organizations to let users bring their devices and many are choosing iOS much to the chagrin of IT.
While Android comes with its own set of potential mine fields, a Network World report from MacIT, the IT track of the Macworld conference, indicated there were complaints aplenty from IT folks who are stuck supporting devices that are clearly designed for consumers.
IT is left to deal with iTunes and Apple IDs and how to bill back app purchases. This is probably not what you had in mind when you decided to go for a career in IT, but it’s part of the brave new world of IT support.
Network World puts it in more blunt terms: “adapt or die.” And from what so-called Apple experts were saying, you’re left with little recourse, because well, Apple doesn’t seem to listen to anyone. They don’t have to.
For serious work one can rely on software which is developed and peer-reviewed by many companies. This is why GNU/Linux, for instance, continues to gain in the enterprise (in phones, servers, and sometimes desktops too). No single company can report combined profits from Linux, but by breaking down and adding numbers from Amazon, IBM, Red Hat, Google, HTC etc. one can get insight. Linux is taking over the world because it is decentralised like Apache and it is not monolithic. Witnessing the success of Wikipedia, more people realise that sharing economy is the future in an age of information abundance. █
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Michael said,
February 14, 2012 at 3:02 pm
All complex tools have weaknesses and bugs – and Apple’s products are no exception. Apple, however, has earned an amazing reputation of excellence by working to make its products be of exceptional quality – they understand what to include and, just as importantly, what to leave out in order to make a product that serves people very, very well. They are *not* flawless in this – far from it and there are many examples I can give where I disagree with their tradeoffs, but overall they do this better than any other major competitor. In doing so they have earned a great deal. Given how acknowledging this is against your cult / herd, you will never admit to any of this and just obsess over their weaknesses or lie about them. It is just what you do. Your obsession with attacking their desire to reduce plagiarism is an excellent example of this.
Another example is your reference to their tools as “toys”. If anything, Macs are not as suitable as game machines are are Windows machines – in that way they are less “toys” then their major competitor. This is not to say that there is not a reasonable way to talk about tech people and their “toys”, but your context is clearly demeaning – you cannot bring yourself to think of Apple’s products as being the exceptional *tools* many of them are.
Apple’s success, of course, do not in any way take away from the success of open source software: OSS has shown itself to be amazing in many areas (servers, embedded devices, etc.). In face, Apple’s success is *in part* based on open source components – both those they have used from others largely as they are and those they have taken over and / or largely improved. Apple is not a sign of open source doing poorly; Apple is a sign of of open source can be a *part* of a solution to making some of the best technological devices the world has ever seen – tools that serve people better than any other competitors in many, many cases.