Apple has been the subject of some bashing lately, I’ve noticed, which is not surprising in light of the company’s popularity and consistent output of beautiful product that works. With 1 million iPad units sold in one month, what’s not to criticize? Maybe some of the bashing is warranted, I don’t know, but much of it seems off. The anti-trust investigation, for example, can’t be right. Although common sense and law don’t necessarily overlap, the idea that a company which is not even close to a monopoly should be regulated as if it were a market, an industry of its own, is sort of disturbing – even by the standards of law that may defy reason. The app store being a store like any other, a private enterprise, I can’t believe that the way its owner determines to stock the shelves is a regulatory issue, and I can only assume that this campaign, whoever is behind it, will end of its own lack of substance.
The more annoying criticism, however – annoying to me at least because it is like a chorus from the rafters that keeps spreading – is that Apple’s downfall will stem from its refusal to embrace openness. According to theory, Apple’s controlling approach had already led to the company’s first demise, several decades back, when its Macintosh line was relegated to niche status despite early promise to become much more than that. In short, the critics argue that Apple has not learned from history and is bound to repeat it.
Truth be told, I always found this to be an empty slogan – that those who don’t know their history are bound to repeat it. I think that those who do, are just as bound. And anyway, history and its repetition are both functions of interpretation. A more correct recommendation might be as follows: Those who misinterpret history don’t realize what it is that is being repeated. Which is not as catchy, admittedly. In the matter at hand – Apple’s history and the company’s inability to stem undesirable repetition – I don’t interpret history in the same way as Apple’s critics, and don’t see the repetition they see.
The argument’s flaw, in my opinion, has to do with context. When Apple was at war with Microsoft in the 1980s and later, the personal computing segment was nascent, the Internet did not yet exist in the popular imagination, telephone communication was being conducted over twisted copper, and musical content was still available on vinyls and cassettes. In contrast, Apple’s battles with Google and others today take place in an environment in which innovation is less monumental… and more incremental. This is an important distinction.
In an environment in which the force of progress is based on perfection, evolution, and smoothing of edges, as opposed to, say, replacing the typewriter and calculator with a computer in every home, the trait that may have been negative thirty years ago could be a valuable asset now. Control, attention to detail, a closed architecture based on superior design and quality manufacture, are good things when the object is not a new technology as much as a superior alternative.
To conclude on a theoretical note, the same action in two different contexts does not signify a repetition. For history to repeat, pairings of action and context must be analogous. It seems like an impossible limitation, and yet history does apparently repeat incessantly. Sometimes, however, it also doesn’t. Or rather, the repetition is of a different history than is imagined.
