Facebook and Apple Should Both Be Scared
chmullig.comWhen you make such a bold claim as your title, you need to back it up with the first sentence.
This article fails to do so, and is presented in a tiny font with big blocks of text. Because of this, I (and probably 95% of people arriving there) can't be bothered to make the effort to extract the meaning out of this article.
Presentation matters, folks.
That's one are where 'old media' tends to get it right -- even the worst of tabloids have better text layout than the average blog.
The challenge is that I don't think the general public understand and care as much as the tech community cares.
If as a tech person, you care enough about these issues, what do you do about it? Are you able to steer your friends toward alternatives? How do we make it clear to the non-tech savvy what these issues really are, and how they are affected.
When looking at the app store, most people (I think) feel that they shouldn't care if apple has a closed ecosystem, because that closed ecosystem has 200k+ apps while the more open android and blackberry have less about 1/4 that amount.
With respect to Facebook, even though I understand the implications of Facebook's privacy policies, I'm damned if I can think of a situation where it would really be used against me (maybe I'm just not evil enough). But I know I don't like their policies.
We need more than just 'alternatives', we need alternatives that are better than these in multiple areas.
Facebook and Apple both had near monopolies in their sectors
Apple never had anything remotely close to a monopoly on mobile phones or even smart phones.
I couldn't find the part the explained why they should be scared.
It was basically a generic "the more you tighten your grasp, the more worlds that slip through your fingers" mantra. Apple and Facebook don't like change, but if they don't change people will use other products.
Not exactly the content that one would expect from such an attention-grabbing headline that makes such a large claim...