Yes, it's great when husband stops beating his wife. What a great husband!
The policy was greedy, and current policy is not a complete reversal — any other purchase systems and even linking to an external shop are still forbidden.
pornel's point is that this isn't a point in Apple's favor, they just saw that being horrible didn't work for them and scaled it down to being merely terrible.
You really equate continual physical and mental abuse with unfavourable trade practices?
Each to their own I guess.
EDIT: My point is that it's a bad metaphor not because there are no links between the two but, as with most heavily emotive metaphors, it comes with too much baggage which distracts from the intended message.
A metaphor doesn't have to be a perfect match for what it's describing but the broad content and emotional tone should be similar and here I think it's hard to justify that this is the case.
A metaphor doesn't equate two things - it suggest some congruence among features.
The original [great great grandparent] comparison was not primarily noting the congruence between Apple's behavior and wife beating, but rather the congruence between the praise some people were giving Apple for their change of behavior and praising someone for ceasing to beat their spouse.
Which makes it a bad metaphor, Apple's behavior is not abusive. We may not like it but Apple only wants a cut of the revenue they think they help generate. There is nothing in my developers agreement that will lead me to believe that Apple loves me so much and won't enact restrictions to my activity as an ios developer to increase their own profits. Our only recourse is to stop developing for Apple's app store.
My point is that it's a bad metaphor because, as with most metaphors which have emotional, criminal or violent connotations, it comes with too much baggage which distracts heavily from the intended message.
I'm happy to accept that negative is reasonable here, I don't accept that emotive in this way this metaphor is, is useful or a good reflection of the situation.
And those are just the tip of iceberg. Is killing the dreams of small businesses built on months of blood and sweat and money for no good reason an acceptable practice?
Big bad Apple taking away all the success iflow was about to have in their dreams of being a third middleman of a zero marginal cost egood.
At what point do the people at iflowreader and readability put on their big boy pants and take some responsibility for lack of their dreams coming true?
In terms of iflow their level of innovation was minimal and they started their business on a platform that took a cut of music sales and a cut of app sales and were then surprised that Apple wanted a cut of other sales.
Readability I'm very slightly more sad about because their model was slightly more interesting but fundamentally it's business and if you put yourself in a position where you're beholden to someone who has shown themselves to be ruthless then I can't get too worked up about it.
Ah, that must be why people complain about my metaphors all the time. I am pretty good at not paying any attention to the baggage, which makes me judge a metaphor just on its merits, whereas other people complain because, ostensibly, they are offended by that.
Given that metaphors are about communication, that people complain about them all the time, and that communication is about other people, you might want to accept that they are bad metaphors.
The whole point of the metaphor is that it would be better if the wife beater hadn't started beating his wife in the first place and doesn't deserve any kudos at this point.
The problem with that it doesn't seem like they backed out of the goodness of heart to benefit app developers. It seems to be that the major services like Kindle and Netflix etc. would've started pulling out if this wasn't done, and since that will greatly diminish the value of the iDevices, Apple was forced to back off to protect it's bottomline. Otherwise it would've continued to impose those fee on small developers and users. To come back to metaphor, it's like the man stopping beating the wife after he was finally threatened with a hefty fine.
Yes, and he's still not beating his wife and that's good. Sure I'd have preferred it if it had come about some other way but this is still good.
The reality is that companies only do things for their own benefit, directly or indirectly, Apple, Google and everyone else included and we shouldn't kid ourselves that they do anything else. Google don't make Android because they love freedom or giving stuff away, they do it because they make shedloads of cash through advertising off the back of mobile internet use on a platform they control. You may love the side effect but I honestly think you're kidding yourself if you think they're doing it out of altruism - after all, don't be evil is looking pretty flakey in quite a few areas now.
(And please note I'm not trying to make this an Apple vs. Google thing, I'm just saying that this is what companies do - they do what works and makes them money).
But ultimately when people screamed and shouted for them to change this stuff, what outcome were you looking for other than it be changed? People spoke and acted, they listened, surely that's good?
If I could come up with a sarcastic one-liner that summarized my hope and belief that not every thread involving Apple has to turn into a holy war, I would post that here.
Sticking with your horrid analogy, it's more like announcing that beatings will begin on a certain date in the future. They received feedback of the negative flavor and changed their minds before the date arrived.
Right before the date arrived - In the analogy, a therapist would probably classify the behavior as emotional abuse.
In the real world, the negative feedback came right away, however Apple let the consequences of their announcement play out and thereby drove potential competitors from the markets in which they are interested.
In addition, Apple did not admit their behavior was wrong, nor did Apple commit to avoid similar behavior in the future.
