Hi all, I’m fresh off of the range having let the lead fly for about 6 hours. My friends and I are sufficiently prepared for any zombie attacks … how about you? For my sanity, let’s just assume that answer is a resounding YES! (if not, you might want to befriend a Republican and get them on speed dial immediately or figure out whether you prefer salt or mustard on your brains). This, of course, has nothing to do with the post topic today unless you take into consideration that that I was cleaning my weapons last night while my mobile computing device was happily being upgraded (foreshadowing).
As a professional IT Architect, I’ve spent most of my professional career designing and consulting on large computing systems. To grossly simplify this landscape, there are really two defined camps in this space. One camp puts forth the mantra of interoperability is king with a nod to Best in Breed. The other camp preaches the tight integration card with a willingness to reduce capabilities at a gain of simplicity. The challenge is to mediate between these ideologies and come up with the best solution. For years, the Best of Breed camp enjoyed big success riding the benefits of reduced vendor lock in and the ability to pick and choose the best answer for each specific need. This all started changing about 10 years ago when the complexities of integration and the inability for vendors to deliver on open standards (I’m speaking to you SUN). Suites and proprietary solutions found their weak spot in the system armor. Since then, the Best of Breed roar has become more of a whimper and the vendor suites have become as sweet as they sound. There is one place where this battle raging … probably the last real battleground for this argument. Any guesses where that is? If you guessed the mobile computing field, you are dead on… and the players? No need for extra power to the synapse – Android vs Apple.
I am on the Android side of this colossal tug of war. As of such I am barraged with the “It Just Works” sermons from the other camp. Apple is so great because everything just works, my Apple products are a gift from heaven because they just work, I did not even have to do anything special to get this new feature functioning because it just works. Hell, Apple is so cool I’ll immediately go out an buy the next version even though it doesn’t really provide me much more value, but I know it will just work even better than what I have. Wow, I have to hand it to Apple, their marketing arm is amazing. I can see how this would be so appealing based on the quirks and idiosyncrasies we encounter with their competitors. Clearly there is room for improvement in the other devices, but what is the price of that discomfort over the benefit of not being held captive to a vendor that essentially limits your freedom on what can and cannot run on YOUR computing device? To me, that price is $100. I can say that because we bought an HP Touchpad during their fire sale. A quick mod of the kernel and we had swapped out the WebOS for Android! Linda now had a fairly functional tablet device she could use for her photography business and (gasp) Facebook. The downside of this is Linda had to put up with the quirks. Not a big deal for me, but I can understand the annoyances of not everything working all the time but some of that is due to bad programming – take for example the Facebook app requiring a location indicator before it will run – this was solved with a fake GPS app, but again, it took some effort to figure out what was wrong.
Flash forward to last month when I decided to breakdown and get Linda an iPad HD. Her photography business was doing well and figured switching over to that platform would work out for her… and we all know .. it just works! Eventually this showed up in the mail:
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