Hasta La Ideas

Never gonna happen.

I’m a fan of captitalism, so I’m always disappointed when it doesn’t work properly.

The whole point of capitalism is that different groups compete to bring us things we need or want at the lowest possible price. Unfortunately, the more complicated and intertwined different businesses become, the harder this gets to pull off.

Case in point: Apple, which I always hold up as a champion of the superior user experience, has just rejected the Google Voice app for the iPhone. This bums me out to no end, as free voice calls and a one-number system are indubitably better for consumers…and terrible for AT&T, who is as ruthless as any cell carrier at wringing every last penny out of us.

Interestingly enough, the necessary evil of hewing to corporate interests is partially what enabled Apple’s original iPod to leap to the front of the pack way back in 2001. Readers may remember that at the time, Sony had competitive MP3 player products–which all sucked, because Sony’s music branch forced Sony’s design branch to implement a pain-in-the-ass system of DRM that greatly degraded the consumer experience and caused the devices to fail in the marketplace.

Apple is clearly in no such danger, but this episode just serves to remind me that while they can still design elegant products with user interfaces way better than anything else out there, yes, they are still as beholden to the bottom line as everyone else.

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