Winer goes on to say “Apple could have kept me, if they had embraced the standards of the Web. Instead they tried to get the Web to balkanize over QuickTime, Cyberdog and OpenDoc. Yuck. I went with the mainstream. Apple’s proposition was more slavery, the Web offered an enticing freedom, for a while, until Microsoft killed Netscape. Oh well. It’s too much trouble to learn a new OS now. Why bother.”
      Poor old Dave. It is worthwhile commenting on him and his statements as he is such a powerful force in the weblog world and amongst the so-called digerati, and what he says is taken very seriously by surprisingly many people. On the other hand he does have a reputation for being an occasional whinger and whiner.
     
OpenDoc and Cyberdog were great technologies Apple developed as alternatives to the usual way of doing things, as alternatives that worked better.
      Apple did not force them down anyone’s throats. When users and developers did not adopt Cyberdog and OpenDoc in sufficient numbers, Apple ceased their development. Apple has never been against standards in any way, shape or form. Mac OS X has excellent, even superlative, support for the Web, for standards and especially open standards, and Apple has a history of such support. There was no balkanization nor slavery.
     
QuickTime is an excellent media layer, player and file format for multimedia, as 100,000,000 mainstream Mac and Windows users have discovered. Slavery, schavery. Balkanization, schmalkanization. Is this really 100,000,000 balkanized and enslaved people, Dave?
      In conclusion, Dave Winer is being just a little bit over-emotional right now. And that is his right, given what he has been through lately. He just needs to disengage his emotions, and re-engage his brain.
      If he bothers to take a clear and unemotional look at Mac OS X running on that old Apple G4 Cube that he has stashed away, then he will conclude that it is easy to use, not a problem to learn, expecially for an old Unix guy like him, and certainly does not enslave nor balkanize anyone.