Open-ness: The Business Practice of...Tomorrow

I could explain why I haven't posted in a while, but I'm not going to. Anyways...

I still recieve the dead-tree version of Wired magazine, even though with how long it takes to get to me all the content is online, anda few of their stories really got me thinking. In one camp, there are the articles about how open-ness an freedom is the "new wave" and how businesses are doing well by "opening up." See this article for what I mean. However, this month's cover story (not to mention a slew of similar articles throughout the internet and traditional media) is on Apple's successes in the last couple of years, despite the fact that they're bucking the trend by being as "closed", or as I prefer "evil" as a tech company can be. Sure they're realeasing an iPhone SDK, but with enough stipulations that you basically have to be having your hand held by Apple the whole time if you ever want to do anything.

While I was thinking about that (my rants on Apple are usually more bile-filled, and much longer, consider yourself lucky,) I began thinkning about another tech company that the mention of doesn't fill me with seas of bloodcurdling rage: Nintendo. Not only are they completely locked down in terms of hardware and software, but their adherents and fanatics closely mirror each other when it comes to the amount of devotion said groups express. Everyone gives Sony a bad rap for being so proprietary (which is justly deserved) , but when you think about it, Nintendo is even worse. Their newest-gen console doesn't even play DVDs, for christ's sake. Imagine how (much more) awesome the DS would be if it took SD cards, played Mp3s/Oggs, and had an active and egaging (and supported) dev community. Yeah, there are "hacker" groups that do some cool stuff with it, but when you come down to brass tacks, if you want to make anything for the Wii, or the DS, or the PS3, or anything uncrippled for the 360, be ready to pay through the nose.

My point is thus: Open technologies are awesome, I love them, I can't imagine making anything nowadays without assuming it would be open somehow. HOWEVER, you can still make big bucks by staying closed, and until someone (I'm looking at you Google/Android,) can prove that being "closed" is going to lose to being "open," there isn't going to be a major shakeup anytime soon.

The MacBook Air...Yeah...

Unless you've had your head buried in the sand for the last two weeks, you've heard about Apple's new MacBook Air, the super-slim notebook that apparently looks really cool. Apparently there were some features left out in order to slim it down. Such as...

• Normal port set, including Ethernet
  
• An optical drive (unless you want to use RemoteDisc, which is still pretty useless)
• A changeable battery

Now, I'm going to say that I'm not a huge Apple fan. I think that Steve Jobs is an all-around jerk, and their products are vastly overpriced, and not anywhere well-designed enough to warrant that cost. However, I am thinking about getting a Mac for my next laptop, so I can triple-boot, and code for all three major platforms. However, the Mac I'd want to get is currently out of my price range at $2500, so it might be a while before I act on that. In fact, my current laptop, a refurbished Averatec 2260, which cost me 8 hundo, is running great. Plus, it has an ethernet jack, in case I go to my dad's house. Oh, and a DVD burner, so I can watch movies I buy, or make backups of my data. And I forgot the SD-card reader, which is really helpful now that I have a Nokia n800 (which I LOVE, by the way.)

One thing I do find HILARIOUS though, is that the last time I used a laptop that required a usb-connected drive, it was in 1992-3, my mom's old IBM, whose model number I can't even remember, but boy was it a clunker. It is counter-intuitive, though, that to use the world's "most portable" laptop, you've got to schlock around another attachment. That might just be me, but I'm pretty sure that the industry started putting drives in laptops so that people didn't have to carry around all that extra crap.

To be fair, there are ways around some of these issues. I haven't seen anyone try it, but there are USB ethernet adapters, which could solve the wired internet problem. As far as the Remote Disc issue goes, that's Apple's problem. My guess is that the next version will fix the music/dvd reading issues. Didn't anyone learn anything from the early iPhone adopters? Apple has a habit of screwing over it's most loyal fans, good thing they like it.

However, I had an "aha" moment when thinking about the battery issue. Sure, you can't change the battery yourself, and if you run out, you're scoobied. Unless Apple has the same idea I had. The Mac power adapters are already pretty huge, though I'm guessing the Air's is smaller (I haven't seen it yet.) So, what should the Jobspire do? Slap an external battery into the power adapter! Charge the laptop's battery first, then the external battery, and if the laptop's battery is going to die, and the user doesn't have access to an AC outlet, they can still plug their power adapter in, and run off the battery power there.

In general, like all of Apple's products, the Air is ridiculously over-hyped. I'd feel bad about giving it more coverage, but I don't get enough traffic to feel guilty about that. It's a one-trick pony, and that trick gets pretty boring real quick when you can't play a DVD.