Over on his blog, Charles Stross asked the question:
is there any way to get to a micro-billing infrastructure from where we are today that doesn't involve burning down the web and starting again from scratch?
I don't believe so, and this is why.
I have a thing against Apple.
They're not the first tech company I have felt that way towards, but it is a definite thing now.
I've been snarking for a while now that...
10%: The percentage of non-Apple laptops at this company.
Apple is the new Microsoft.
-- Imperator 1138 (@SysAdm1138) September 3, 2015
But it's more complex than that. I've made quite a lot of money off of Microsoft; the first 13 years of my resume read like a Microsofty (the Novell stuff is ignored these days). Exchange. Web-serving. Clustering. Scaled up file-serving. Yep, made a lot of money with it.
And yet, when the most recent iPhone announcement hit my inbox(*) my reaction was definitely not the one I had about, say, Windows XP back in the day. Apple is not actually a Microsoft, and there are many people out there who will gladly fight me for saying it might be. But in terms of market-share for desktops... 90%? Those are numbers Microsoft was rocking for a long, long time. Admittedly, this is at a startup, not at a 1000+ employee company where manageability trumps individual employee preferences. But small companies become big companies...
My reaction to that email was a vengeful unsubscribe. Apparently I didn't want to be seen to be one of them.
I have Apple in the home. There is an iMac. We have Wifi from Apple because the iMac wouldn't stay attached to anything else. But it isn't anything I use on a daily basis(*).
At work I'm one of four non-Apple users. Three of us are Linux-desktop people, and we have a lone Windows user (who is a pretty chill dude). At least one of the other Linux users seems to feel the same way I do about Apple. So we're out there.
I used to be pretty cool with people using whatever, and believed I could use anything if given time. Heck, I was dual-stack Microsoft/Novell at a time when you were either one or the other. And I was dual-stack Linux/Microsoft at my last startup, which is a kind of unholy union people don't admit to but are actually kind of in demand.
But apparently I draw the line at OSX and iOS. When did that happen?
(*): I have an iPhone. It was a gift from a previous employer. Current Employer doesn't pay for telecoms, so I'm using it as my workphone. Thus, I get Apple marketing mail. And use it daily, because it was a free phone. When Apple decides this model is gauche and it becomes unusable, I'll replace it with an Android and feel relieved.