Thursday, October 06, 2011

Lateline - 06/10/2011: Jobs more showman than geek: Daisey:

TONY JONES: So tell me this, from your perspective, how does Apple under Steve Jobs turn into what you call now the most locked down computer company in the world?

MIKE DAISEY: It is hard. It is a story that affects a lot of us, I think. You know we get older and we are often trapped by the circumstances, the strengths that we create ourselves. The story of our lives are often are defined that way. We start out as rebels and pirates and then we go out to change the world and when we're not looking we succeed and we change the world but the world changes us too.

And I think Apple today is locked down in a way that almost no computing platform has been; the iPhone, iPad. People can't touch the software in there; it is controlled by Apple very directly. And part of that is out of the desire, Steve Jobs' desire to control everything.

But after a certain point that level of control starts to take away choice from the user and it is a hard thing this continuum because you start you start out with the best of intentions but if you're not careful, you can go from a place where you're creating something and shaping something to taking away options from users and making computing fundamentally less free.