Dave Winer of Scripting News -- possibly not The Guardian's biggest fan -- bought a Mac to work on OPML, and had a slightly less than wonderful experience. Anyone who criticises Apple or the Mac can expect to be insulted and abused, but he has had some email support. On his blog, he muses:
This is the kind of advice I've been getting from Mac users. Good stuff. You know, based on the rah-rah's from developers who are probably too scared of Apple to say what they really think, I thought everyone else thought Apple was the perfect company and the perfect computer. That's the downside of people being too scared to speak up, we get shitty information. How can we change this system, so that people aren't so scared? Or can we get Apple to thicken up their skin a bit, and learn to not punish people who have the nerve to criticize them. Blogs were supposed to fix all this. Frankly I think it hurts Apple to just have rah-rah public discourse and commentary.
In my experience the leading companies with super-thin skin: Apple, Google, and by far the worst -- O'Reilly. It's so funny people think they're so cool and not-evil. These are the biggest control freaks in the computer industry, again, in my experience. We were joking about Google at dinner the other night, with their policy of not talking to CNET because they had the nerve to print some public information about their CEO. We really need to do something about this. It's a gross ugly disease. Compared to these companies, Microsoft is positively laid-back. You can quote me on that.
Winer was an early developer for and very enthusiastic supporter of the Mac. He posted an interesting comment on Apple's attitude to developers, Platform is Chinese household, on October 29, 1994.
