Alright, so maybe “war” is overstating it, but as I argued earlier this year Apple is very much posturing itself against the idea of the open web and for the closed consumption environment controlled by its Apps. I stumbled on a couple follow-up posts that follow-up and nuance this debate. First, Ken Fisher from arstechnica.com on Apple’s hypocrisy/self-contradiction (my emphases):
You might think that Apple holds both [the open web and the App Store] in equal esteem, but
its release of Safari 5 shows that Apple has less regard for publishers on the Web than it does for publishers (and developers) it wants to entice to come to the App Store.And the App Store is becoming its own little mirror-reflection of the Web. You’ve got content from news providers, you’ve got social networking, you’ve got games, RSS readers—the list goes on and on. You’ve also got, courtesy of Apple, a 100 percent Apple-owned, Apple-powered advertising platform called iAds.
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in the end we’re left with a) an open platform [Safari] where Apple is willing to toy with Web publishers, modify their content presentation, and suppress their ads, and b) Apple’s curated, closed platform, where everything is done by Apple’s rules or it’s not done at all.
Fisher is honing in on Safari’s new Reader feature, a space Arc90 has been treading for some time. So it’s somewhat synchronistic that Arc90 echoes the original frustration with Apple’s anti-open web model (though not it’s Reader) in the blog post, “Why We Built Readability” comments,
…publishing finds itself looking elsewhere to solve the puzzle of distributing and monetizing. Magazines like Time, Wired and Popular Science have decided to invest in delivering purchasable “packages” of their content that work on Apple’s iPad.
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For us, the Web is the right bet. The notion of tethering content delivery to a particular proprietary platform or hardware device is admitting defeat.
