We haven’t had a good fisking around here in a while, and I’m feeling a little frisky, so let’s talk about Dave’s finger-wagging post entitled ‘No one asked this question‘.
Amazingly no one asked this question at the meetup, but it just came up in an email from a famous journalist who works at a gadget site you’ve heard of and probably read.
Translation: important people send me important emails and that makes me very, very important. You should be impressed by this.
The question goes like this.
Now that Apple is reading Flickr feeds in AppleTV, maybe there’s no point continuing to develop FlickrFan.
Learn to English. This is not a question, it is a statement.
I always wonder what’s behind this question. Does the person think that people who use FlickrFan will stop using it because AppleTV can read the RSS feeds that Flickr produces? How would that work? I don’t understand.
That’s precisely how it would work. AppleTV does all of the important things that FlickrFan does. It does them better, prettier, and with less superfluous overhead.
I bought an AppleTV, I tried fitting it into my lifestyle, but it didn’t. Apple’s vision of how the Internet connects to the living room is a very controlling one. They attain a certain ease of use, true — but the trade-off is too great. I like all the special effects, but I like to be in control of my own experience. I want to be the programmer. And I despise DRM as much as my customers hated copy protected software in the 80s. It does nothing positive for me, as a user, and I don’t think it works for the vendors, but then that isn’t my problem, it’s theirs.
This would be more persuasive if a) we knew why it didn’t fit into his lifestyle and b) we were told how it is, exactly, that FlickrFan “fits” better. Also, the entirety of FlickrFan’s provenance and continued development is summed up in the statement that he wants to “be the programmer.” This is like someone saying “I prefer to make my own food, therefore I’m quite sure nobody else will want to eat at restaurants.”
I much prefer the Mac Mini to AppleTV, and to everything else. But this question has always been the stinkbomb lurking over the whole Mac market. The reporters don’t stand up for the vendors. What does this guy want me to do? Would he prefer if I stopped developing FlickrFan? Will he say I’m stupid if I do. Maybe I am. Hey, I don’t ask for any money for it. Basically I do it because I want to help create a DRM-less environment for us to enjoy networked living rooms.
This paragraph is unintelligible. He prefers the Mac Mini to everything else? A juicy steak? The touch of a woman? Where do those questions come from? Who is supposedly asking them? Who is “this guy”? Who are the “vendors”. If I ever wrote something like this for a boss or professor, I’m quite sure I’d be flipping burgers for a living right now.
FlickrFan is one of the things I’m working on. Sure it’s crazy to think that I could actually contribute a little to the Mac platform. Apple surely is going to crush me tomorrow, maybe they already have. But why do users care? Why do reporters? It seems to me that we all benefit from choice. When it’s a single-party system things stagnate. When there’s competition, new ideas can gain traction even if it doesn’t fit into the Apple vision for its users. (Which is fairly limited, read this Doc Searls piece written in 1997, it’s every bit as true today as it was then.)
Nobody is suggesting that there shouldn’t be competition. What is being suggested is that Dave has already lost that competition. Continued development of FlickrFan is like the Dallas Cowboys continuing to practice just in case the Giants get sick and can’t make it to Lambeau this weekend.
Hey if you think building on Flickr is crazy, think about this. My next product competes with iTunes as a podcatcher! I must be out of my mind, eh?
Dave’s new project will “compete” with iTunes in much the same way that Scripting.com “competes” with think-tanks for the creation of solid political theory. He is simply not capable of creating anything that can even visit the same zipcode as iTunes.
Finally, I could ask this guy, who I respect enormously and whose work I read practically every day, a similar question. Hey Apple writes about gadgets on apple.com. What does that say about YourGadgetSite? Got any plans for a new job? Perhaps a new career? Now that would be just rude, wouldn’t?
No, it wouldn’t, actually. There’s nothing rude about asking someone how a new competitor in the market will impact their business.
How about some respect for developers?
The reason that Dave thinks the “question” is disrespectful is it makes him feel defensive. He feels defensive because he takes the question as a personal affront to his ability, imagination, and self-worth. While it’s true that FlickrFan is a steaming pile of manure (as software goes), the fact that Apple’s horde of coders can do something better than one guy should not be surprising to anyone.
Can’t believe we’re still having this discussion in 2008. Can’t we get past this?
The problem Dave had in the linked post was people asking him questions of which he did not approve. Like… “what do you think of AppleScript?” My god, what savages!
I love the way, in the very same post he links to, Dave claims is so disrespectful to ask him about a competitor then writes this:
“Chuck Shotton, the author of MacHTTP had a nice entourage party on Thursday night. That party was packed with networking leaders, and lots of wannabe-leaders (myself included — in the latter category). I like Chuck’s energy, we talked about my plans for a server and he got very agitated when I said I was planning on using a Sun for the server. I must admit, I’d prefer to use a Mac, but who’s going to respect userland.com if it runs on a Mac? This is deliberately worded to extract an evangelistic essay from Chuck. I think you’d all be interested in what he has to say.”
So it’s fine for Dave to try and ask Chuck about why people should use MacHTTP rather than another platform, but woe betide anyone who asks Dave why people should use Frontier rather than AppleScript.
Dear Eye,
Nicely done!
Once again, you’ve gotten to the heart of (Winer’s) darkness in only a few paragraphs. Yes, you’re quite right about Dave’s cognitively dissonant way of describing the tech world. I’m still not sure what great offense the unidentified journo committed but that’s Dave. Anyway, keep up the great work. We need more puncturing of self-aggrandizing phonies – ungrammatical phonies in particular.
Best