Apple has spoken out about the rumours that they were selling Final Cut but they haven’t said a word about the Piestar clone. Weird. One story is grumbling along in a smallish circle without escaping the video/Mac press and the other is getting worldwide attention from loads of places.
Why hasn’t Steve Jobs paid the Piestar people a visit with his ninja fruitarian friends and crushed them like a grape? Perhaps it’s because they’ve moved offices so often. That or they’re really not going to do anything and erm… well, leave the customers they don’t actually want* to the rest of the industry.
To the best of my knowledge** the legality of a EULA has never been robustly tested in a court of law so Piestar might not actually be doing anything wrong at the moment but for Apple to go so long without saying anything makes it all the more fun. Has Schiller told Steve his Mac is at the repair shop and kept him away from the Internet for a couple of weeks for fear of Mr Jobs throwing an eppy and killing everyone who: makes, buys, uses, lives near, smells like or looks like the clone? Don’t think Steve can’t have you killed. All he has to do is type Killalldick in to a Terminal session and then your user name. Jean Louis Gassée turns up with a copy of BeOS and that’s the end of you. So if they’re not going to kill Piestar with legal red tape it can’t afford to defend rather than any actual point of law what are they going to do? I reckon they’re going to ignore it publically and then if the shit storm lasts longer than six months send in the fruitarians in.
*If you want a really cheap Mac then Apple doesn’t want your business. Sorry to disappoint you but Steve Jobs thinks you’re too poor to bother with. Why should he spend all his time making beautiful products for people too dumb to earn enough money to justify buying something because it’s pretty. Of course, if you are an Apple customer then that makes you a whole other shade of dumb but hey we all have our cross to bear.
Perhaps the reason the Vista video (below) looks so bad is becasue of the iPod packaging video (above) The Vista one just isn’t honest enough so at one level looks almost real. Therfore, you’re never quite sure if it’s meant to be a joke or if they really feel that way. The iPod video is brutally honest. The iPod video makes Microsoft look good because they’ve met the elephant in the room head on. Apple makes nice clean packaging Microsoft make stickered up stuff that looks a bit naff* It’s refereshing and it highlights the brand difference nicely.
The Vista video on the other hand looks like the managment team trying to do the same thing but within ‘company guidelines’. The elephant in the room is that Vista isn’t doing as well (in the press at least) as Microsoft hoped but SP1 should change all that and the sales team (the indended audience for this I assume) can use SP1 as leverage to overcome the objection that XP works fine. I could be completely wrong (I often am) but the expensive looking profduction does’nt help either. Dancing in the dark probably wasn’t such a good choice either why not Born to run?
(* I say naff because I like Apple packaging others may not see a problem)
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The future is online! Especially for big greedy companies with big greedy lawyers.
**Updated
And just like that they changed their minds… Kind of
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This Keefe thing has grown into a bit of mountain from the anthill it began life as. The defence of Keefe and his question has been on the slow burner even though criticism was swift. The arguments that his question wasn’t dumb and that people who think it is seem to fall into three camps: The Columbo defence, the I’m a journalist you wouldn’t understand defence and The what would you ask then? Defence.
The Columbo approach
As far as I’m concerned, is total codswallop. Columbo may well have asked dumb questions to illicit an incriminating answer from a potential murderer but it’s not a real world example of anything because it’s fiction. Just like there could never be a president of America like Bartlett or a doctor like House because they are fiction.
The Columbo approach admits that the question is dumb but that it needed to be asked because the questioner had a deeper understanding, or a least a hunch, that there was a deeper story. Also, it requires the person answering the question to believe that they had the upper hand and could never be found out. Not likely in this situation.
The I’m a journalist you wouldn’t understand argument
is the most self-centred and ridiculous argument as far as I can see. It’s an argument that belittles bloggers (lumping them all into one handy basket) as people who don’t get the black art of disseminating information. Don’t get me wrong I certainly think there are journalists who are more experienced and we indeed do perform a different task than that of bloggers but to say your opinion is wrong because you blogged it instead of writing about it for a publication is a bit shallow and self-important.
Finally we reach the
What would you ask then?
Defence. Total waste of breath and time for two reasons. The first is that if you reply with a question the inevitable response is ‘well that’s even dumber because…’ The second is it’s a discussion about how dumb the question was not what else should he have asked because that’s the question he asked. Debating what ‘might’ have been asked is a waste of time.
Though your mother may have told you that the question not asked is the only stupid one she probably also told you that you were beautiful and that you shouldn’t care what other people think of you.
I’ve read a fewdifferentapproaches to the defence of Keefe.
I stick by my original opinion that asking why Apple doesn’t put stickers on its machines was dumb.
When a classmate in her freshman math class at UCLA tapped Danica McKellar on the shoulder and asked, “Aren’t you the girl who …” she expected him to quiz her about her role as Winnie Cooper on the iconic television show The Wonder Years. Instead he continued, “… got the best score on the exam?” For the first time, McKellar felt recognized as something other than a child actress.
