What is Evil 2.0?
Evil 1.0 was Microsoft. Evil 2.0 is Apple and Google.
I know Evil 1.0 well. I worked for it. I recognize Evil 2.0 easily by its signs. I know the bad– and the good– that Evil can accomplish.
Evil 2.0 must be understood.
| Evil 1.0 was geeky and asocial. |
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Evil 2.0 is cool and charismatic. |
Evil 2.0 seduces. We lust to touch the IPhone, even at the cost of our ability to choose software, carriers, and media formats. No Skype or Ogg here, unless Apple and Cingular want them.
Evil 2.0 is lock in at the grandest scale.
Evil 2.0 is smarter than you are.
Evil 2.0 misleads through paradox.
It is the evil that says “Don’t be evil”. It’s the crawler that can’t be crawled, the datamining blackhole.
It’s the privately owned judge of who gets noticed on the internet.
Evil 2.0 is the Google search API that goes straight from beta to oblivion.
Evil 2.0 is all-knowing. No one knows exactly how much Google knows about you– except Google.
Take the thesis of Evil 1.0, synthesize with Evil 2.0, and toss in a good dash of Homeland Security, and we have a grave threat to freedom of software, thought and privacy. And we will greet our new overlords with flowers and iPhones.
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[…] Phil Bogle takes a swipe at the Apple iPhone lock-in model. I can’t say that I disagree. In a world where we’re rapidly moving away from proprietary solutions, the iPhone is an anachronism. Bookmarking:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
By Evil 2.0: Cool and Charismatic -- Alec Saunders .LOG on 01.24.07 2:41 pm
I don’t agree with you on the Apple front. I’ve heard this argument before about Apple. But your data is *not* locked in. Everything that the iPhone is displaying is data you can easily control. I wouldn’t call this evil - more like rude.
I think Apple is trying to do to the phone what they did to the music player. Close it down and make it as simple as possible. I would argue the genius in that is that it may be a locked down device but I have freedom in what goes onto it.
As a mac developer, I would love to be able to take a shot at writing apps for the iPhone. I think it is short sighted by Apple to close it down.
The other thing to remember is that the majority of people want applicances. The freedom fighters are us geeks that want to endlessly tweak anything we get our hands on. My mom just wants it to work. Two audiences, two expectations. Evil or not - depends on what you want to do with the device.
Google, on the other hand, is potentially very evil. And so is Amazon. Both have enormous amounts of information on you that you have zero control over. That is far scarier than if I can play an ogg file on a phone.
By Andrew Carter on 01.25.07 3:14 am
I agree on the potential risk from uncontrolled data hoarding being much greater than a closed software platform.
But I’m still not ready to let Apple off the hook on the closed software platform.
If Microsoft decided that a competitor could no longer write software for Windows Mobile, and announced an exclusive deal with a particular carrier, I think this would raise quite a few eyebrows– even if they claimed it was to ensure a better user experience.
By philbo on 01.25.07 8:57 pm
But I don’t think Apple has said they are building a smartphone or an application platform. Everyone is assuming this but I don’t think that’s what they built. It’s what I and most other people wanted but that’s a different issue.
By Andrew Carter on 01.28.07 3:53 pm
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