Palm Pre’s Politics will be it’s Salvation

A thought provoking article from a friend’s blog about the Palm Pre caused me to change a lot of my views on the way the computer world works today.

Let’s imagine that the computer world can be compared to today’s political climate, where on one spectrum you have an autocracy (or rule by one man or entity), and on another hand you have democracy (rule by the people). I have thought for the last 15 years or so that autocracy for the computer world is a good thing. The only form of rule that has the discipline to keep all those little bits and pieces of software to play nice with each other is an all-powerful autocracy (despotism, dictatorship, call it what you will). One of the biggest problems for platforms that are open to developers (let’s take Windows for instance) is that developers rely on soft market pressures to get things right, and so everything is made just barely good enough. Apple, what I would deem the most powerful computer autocrat today, has a strict and well, almost fascist filter on how, when, and why a software product is released. And all software products are sure to work virtually all the time, every time.

As you’ve probably predicted, I am again going to compare iPhone to Palm Pre. To start, iPhone will always win in sales. Its kind of like, what if Hitler got a 10 year head start? He would have won easily, just like iPhone is winning without really having to put up that much of a fight. They’ve had a superior product in advance for years. As Sam points out in his article however, Apple’s fascist zeal for controlling the App store might be the death of it. With so many Apps being rejected for arbitrary and unwritten reasons, Apple might someday find itself behind many devices like the Palm Pre that will have webOS and a much more libertarianesque development platform. The SDK was recently released, only time will tell.