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Comment by jat850 | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to speculate (and nothing more) just based on a few discussions a friend and I have had. It seems as though with Windows 8 and the trend towards unification with the mobile experience, Microsoft is headed in the path of a walled-garden style environment.

It may become more difficult (or just less convenient) for the consumer to select software that falls outside of the "Windows App Store" (whatever it may be termed).

This type of distribution model (Steam being another example) would be counter to Blizzard's apparent philosophy on the matter.

So I don't know that "Windows 8", the operating system, is bad for Blizzard. But maybe "Windows 8", the direction, is.

Again, 100% speculation. No necessary basis in fact, just ideas bounced around.

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This is why I went back to Snow Leopard from Mountain Lion. Download file, install dmg (or exe), use software... "app store" irrelevant.

With respect, I think you're misled. The App Store is completely optional in Mountain Lion. Gatekeeper can be turned completely off if you so choose.

Don't you think this might be a case of "boiling the frog slowly"?

That's the impression I get from both Apple and Microsoft's recent OS/App Store directions.

A few years from now the apologists for each will be saying "Well hardly anyone but super techies ever used those options to disable verification anyway, so I understand why they turned them off".

> Don't you think this might be a case of "boiling the frog slowly"?

No, because that would be fantastically stupid of them and none of them are stupid. Not even Microsoft--I mean, I think the Metro slop is a joke, but no, they're not stupid enough to do that. What you are peddling doesn't even make sense because precisely what the fearmongerers (see, this goes both ways, think about that next time you call me an "apologist") because it is fairly unlikely that anyone is ever going to be writing native applications from an iPad so it really does follow that they need a mostly-unencumbered environment from which to make the software that makes the whirly buy-the-iPad-buy-the-apps wheel go around.

Which, as it happens, is what Apple has said for quite a while that they're doing: iOS is the daily-driver car and OS X is the do-work truck. Which, though I don't use iOS myself anymore, is a completely reasonable division of labor for the majority of computing tasks.

To be fair, Apple isn't doing a lot to undo that misleading. His anecdote isn't the first I've heard.

Honestly? It's the first I've heard from someone with interests that would lead them to Hacker News. Gatekeeper was talked about at length well before it was rolled out and it is super, super easy to find out how to disable it. There's a sort of minimum awareness beneath which I'd certainly expect to hear of people having trouble, but I'm a little surprised that they're here.

Point well received, but just to be dead sure: System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Allow Applications downloaded from: [X] Anywhere will restore previous behavior.

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