Today, Friday 21, 2012, I posit that it may be in our best interests to wish Austin was right the first time. There is a chance that capitalism (that is, the creation of a product with corporate profit valued higher than consumer benefit), is at its core, bad for technology. While I realize that the analogy I intend to use may be flawed given the financial failure it has proven to be, the letter that Mark Zuckerberg published prior to Facebook's IPO is riddled with gems of altruism and philosophy that Android fans no doubt share, regardless of our preference towards Google+
. Assuming that Mr. Zuckerberg was not disingenuous when writing this manifesto, I believe his words eloquently state not only why Apple will ultimately fail in the long run unless it re-revolutionizes its strategy, but also explains why the Facebook IPO has proven to be such a fiasco.
How does this relate to Android? Simple. It was a breath of fresh air to see Matias Duarte recently proclaim that he feels he is only "a third of the way done with regards to consistency, responsiveness, and polish" in Android. Apple and Facebook should serve as a warning to Duarte and others at Google: focus on the product, not on the bottom line.
In the following, I intend to decry capitalism's influence on technology by using the Facebook IPO letter as evidence...
Exhibit A:
Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.
- Mark Zuckerberg
This statement's validity aside, no one can argue the effect technology has had in shrinking the world. I live in rural Illinois and have made friends on WordFeud from places as close as Los Angeles and as far away as Scotland. For proof that a company should focus on its social mission as opposed to its financial one, one needs look no further than the Linux Foundation. It would be hard to find an OS kernel more trusted/used in the tech community while maintaining its openness and steadfast belief in the community contribution process.
Exhibit B:
Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.
- Mark Zuckerberg
Case in point, iOS Maps is hot garbage. Google Maps is a better app. The end. Period. Even BGR says so, which is saying a whole lot. So why did Apple decide to drop Google Maps support for their own app. Money. Most specifically, Apple didn't want Google making ad revenue in a place where they could make their own. While this is an excellent business decision (make money for yourself, while taking it from your competitor), this is a terrible decision for consumers. If Apple was interested is creating the best product and not the most lucrative, Google Maps would still be standard issue on iOS devices.
Exhibit C:
Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.
- Mark Zuckerberg
As rooters and flashers, this sentiment surely rings true if you're frequenting a web-site like RootzWiki, whose sole purpose is to provide you with the tools necessary to modify your device, made by people who believe those tools should be free and created to the best of their abilities. That said, when the most popular device on the planet has proprietary everything (I'm looking at you 19-pin dock connector), and has an App Store locked down harder than Fort Knox, no one wins. Nothing in Apple's "revolutionary" cash grab that is the iPhone 5 is open or meritocratic.
Where is this going?
Let's clear things up. By no means do I feel like Apple is going the way of Nokia, RIM, Palm, or MySpace anytime soon. What I do feel though is that technological innovation has slowed recently, and greed is to blame. If more companies could reflect the "Hacker Way" that is described above, competition would foster more innovation than litigation and blind hoarding ever has.
What do you think? Would the world benefit from a technological model more akin to Linux than what we have currently? Is it possible to make a profit and still be consumer-friendly? Hit up the comments, I've dusted off my flame suit.
