Once in a while Slate publishes a gem of an article. This article gets to the heart of whats dangerous about Apple and why desperate publishers of all stripes will be disappointed if they look to the App store to save their businesses.
With the ascendance of the iPad, aka "The Jesus Tablet," Apple's Lateran tendencies have grown ever more baroque. The arrival of the new device was shrouded in something better described as religious mystery than mere corporate secrecy. The spiritual leader, recently returned from near death, celebrated the birth of his "magical and revolutionary" gadget at a ceremony akin to a high mass, beneath a glowing Apple icon that must be approaching the crucifix as a universally recognized symbol.
In this metaphor, content publishers are like the halt and the lame who flock to Lourdes in search of a miraculous cure. The pilgrims' desperate hope is that Steve Jobs will restore their businesses to health by blessing them with "apps"—a new way for them to charge readers for content and revive full-page advertisements in electronic form. Burn me for saying so, but they're dreaming.
Be sure to click through to an except of Umberto Eco's article, The Holy War: Mac vs. DOS, from his column, La bustina di Minerva, in the Italian news weekly Espresso, September 30, 1994.
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