Ed Bott

May 28 2011: Welcome, Daring Fireball readers.

You do realize that Mr. Gruber is playing a fun little game here, right? He seems a wee bit embarrassed that he has been so desperately wrong about the current state of OS X security lately.

You might want to ask him if he still stands behind his Wolf! post? He quotes a post of mine that turns out to have been extremely accurate. He published that post less than a month ago, so he can’t have forgotten about it. Indeed, many Mac-oriented news sites have written on the same subject, and yet Gruber has stopped updating it. Why do you think that is?

And for some reason, Gruber has completely ignored my detailed response:

Crying wolf? Apple support forums confirm malware explosion

I highly recommend that you read this post too:

Measure Twice, Spin Once

It revisits a 2004 post from, gasp, Daring Fireball that Gruber appears to have completely forgotten about. See how easy it is to go back in time and find examples of where someone tries to predict historical trends and guesses wrong?

I do hope Mr. Gruber addresses these important issues again one of these days. He seems to want to change the subject.

Oh, and on the point of this post: At the time it was written, in July 2008, the iPhone had been out for a year, but the App Store was literally less than 48 hours old. The 3G iPhone had been introduced less than 24 hours earlier.

If you had owned an iPhone for the previous year, you had not had access to Microsoft Exchange, the dominant business e-mail platform. You had had pitifully slow Internet access on your phone. And you didn’t have any apps. It was definitely a version 1.0 product.

If you had “come back in a year,” of course, Apple would still not have had any business products. Nor would they have had any two years later, in 2010.

Apple did correctly anticipate the rise of mobile platforms and build a great product line that is extremely successful today. They have done a superb job of targeting high-income consumers and small businesses. I tip my hat to Mr. Jobs.

James Kendrick noted this little detail when he bought a new iPhone at the Apple Store yesterday:

The most interesting part of the entire purchase process was seeing the role that Microsoft played in every single iPhone purchase at the Apple store. You see, Apple doesn’t use cash registers or even Macs for the purchase process. No, they use handheld wireless devices made by Symbol, maker of such things, and every single one of them is running the Windows CE operating system. That’s right, Apple had to turn to Microsoft for a point-of-sale (POS) solution solid enough to work under such volume sales situations. These Symbol devices used barcode scanning to input each iPhone’s serial number and other information, used a credit card scanner to accept customer payment, and tapped a wireless connection to not only the Apple store’s network but to the AT&T network to activate the new service for the customer.

Without resorting to snark, I think this illustrates the fundamental difference between Apple, a seller of luxury consumer products, and Microsoft, a developer of business and consumer platforms.

Yes, I know that the current CW is that the iPhone is the new platform, and that might be true. But let’s come back in a year or two and see just how successful the platform really is.