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Comment by eykanal | Hacker News Reader

These kinds of posts really bug me. Users don't give a rat's left buttock whether the "ecosystem" is closed or open or anything in between. They want something which works well and lets them buy stuff they want. Simple observation of consumer behavior has shown over and over again that people simply don't care about whether their stuff is tied to Apple or Google, or whether their location is being tracked by Twitter or Verizon, or whether they'll have a difficult time moving their music to a different device later on.

If this was written as another post trying to convince developers to avoid developing for closed ecosystems it wouldn't as bad; evangelists can be a good thing, even if he's fighting a losing battle. However, as this post seems to be geared towards consumers, it's almost completely pointless ranting.

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They want stuff that works yes, until it goes out of fashion or something that works better comes along. Then they learn th ecosystem lesson the hard way...

That is the problem.

Why is that a problem?

I suggest you think about it some more from a non-technical user's perspective:

"How the shit do I get my stuff off this iPhone onto my Nexus?"

I suggest at some point it could also become Apples problem.

They do charge a premium and they do make mistakes so they must have users moving to other platforms.

Right now the move to another platform is painful, but obviously anyone who goes ahead and moves despite that pain is going to have far less chance of ever moving back.

How do non-technical users solve technical problems? They ask technical users. Who will tell them to sync their contacts from itunes to windows contacts then upload them to a google account.

I still don't see any problem.

Actually most non-technical users live with their loss and quietly swear at the technology. Technical users are realistically far and few between.

Exactly. Either this or just say "c'est la vie", deal with it, and move on.

Author here. I'm sorry you feel that way. I think users should care. These monocultures we're breeding are - I think - harmful to society and the economy - see this excellent article about predatory pricing http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/03/editorial-amazon-and-goog...

I'm naive enough to think that we can change people's minds.

I hear you, sorry if I came across too harsh. While you may or may not be correct, I don't think these posts do anything to help the situation, and particularly given that you don't propose any suggestions it comes across (to me) as ranting. I personally think that nowadays, given where the industry is headed and how consumers have demonstrated their interests, it's completely unreasonable to expect the purchase of computer software to be similar to that of durable goods (e.g., your oven), and I don't see that changing without a sufficiently strong business model supporting whatever alternative that you can devise.

Oh, it's totally a rant. I'm just a lone blogger trying to see if anyone feels the same way I do.

It just disappoints me that industry is trying to move to a "buy everything from us - because that's the only guarantee it will work" system.

Good discussing things with you.

I'm "naive" enough to think that if you bought into an "ecosystem" that was known to be a walled garden, you have no business complaining about the perfectly foreseeable consequences of that decision.

Don't want to be part of the ecosystem? Then don't be. But what's the point of ranting about it? Just vote with your wallet.

This kind of thing goes back and forth. Sometimes people are happy to buy everything from the same company have it "just work". ...until something really cool comes along from an other company and all their locked in gadgets won't work with it.

In the 90's people rejected locked up curated networks in favor of the open internet. Sony has always tried to lock people into proprietary formats (Memory Stick, MiniDisc), but the open alternatives have usually won. When an open standard leads to more competition and better products people buy it, whether they care about openness for its own sake or not.

You're right, although I'll note that Minidisc wasn't really a failure. It was utterly huge in Japan, and widely adopted by other companies [no doubt playing big royalties to Sony].

Minidisk eventually proved a technical dead-end because of the development of solid-state storage and the internet, but I can easily see it lasting much longer and becoming more dominant if those things hadn't happened; it had a lot of momentum behind it for a while.

Lots of people don't care about voting in elections, giving to charity, partaking in public demonstrations or looking after their health either.

The problem is not so much whether people mind if their location is tracked or whether they have control over their hardware etc. It's more that once these things reach a critical mass it is very difficult to start to go back if we don't like where we are or indeed for an individual to make a choice to live outside of this stuff.

It is articulated quite well here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG0KrT6pBPk

At around 09:00

I'm a user who cares. Please don't pretend to speech for the world.

"Simple observation of consumer behavior has shown over and over again that people simply don't care..."

Depends on who's doing the research, doesn't it? Because my repeated observation for 25 years is that, when people become aware how they're being screwed by -some- technology (starting with C64 copy protection), they turn away from it.

So the behavior you claim to observe only obtains so long as consumers can be kept ignorant about their options. You might hope for that, but once people discovered the flaws in Edison's phonographs and records, they moved on. And, oh yes, they will.

Do you have very old records, old books, etc? Are you glad you can still enjoy them?

I don't worry so much about walled gardens as long as I can make backups to Ogg Vorbis (etc.) formats from iTunes purchases.

I am a happy customer of Amazon but I make permanent copies in open formats of a small percentage of Kindle books I buy that I might want in 10 years.

I have a lot of family and friends who are not techies. I advise them (and help) to save stuff they buy.

There's no sense in making a backup of a lossy format to a different lossy format. The decoders aren't going to go anywhere; just keep the original file.

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