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Quote of the day

Jeff Atwood rants against Apple’s walled garden, the iTunes:

[L]inks to any sort of music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, audiobooks or anything else available through Apple’s iTunes store requires custom software to be installed on your computer before they will display thing one to you. Is it so unreasonable to expect links in your browser to resolve to, oh, I don’t know, web pages containing information about the thing you just clicked on?

Yours truly has, on occasion, spit many an unkind word in the direction of Apple’s Evil Empireā„¢. Yet Apple doesn’t cease to flourish in spite of that or any other unfavorable opinion thrown in its face.

Jeff points out how AOL’s custom “gateway to the Internet” hasn’t quite stood up the test of time.

Just wondering, though: would its fate be any different now, with the Web being what it is, a vast universe of endless choices?

Perhaps the mind-numbing complexity of the Web does indeed create a space for an orderly sub-space within it that is much more restricted but also, in a fashion, a lot more consistent and elegant

There is demand for both open and closed business models, but the trend towards more openness does not signify an imminent totality thereof; more things will become open, yet many will remain closed still.

Many will continue to prefer a padded cell to a messy jungle.

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