kickingbear

What’s the worst that could happen? Everything that Microsoft hopes for with Windows 8 on tablets comes true and it becomes the new Windows PC for the new dominant form factor. The iPad takes the position of the Mac in the PC space. Guess who’s still laughing all the way to the bank?

“Does it run Office?”

“Yes, it’s on the App Store.”

And if Windows 8 for tablets isn’t everything that Microsoft hopes it will be? Well, we start to see Windows as a platform that’s on the way out and iOS as the platform that can carry Microsoft’s Office customers into the future. A future where Microsoft focuses on enterprise components and their lucrative Office suite. And that too may fade, in time. That’s the way things go.

That’s an Apple centric perspective. A Microsoft perspective may well be:

Microsoft is a software company who’s roots lie in delivering tools to personal computer users so they can make the most of their hardware. It started with MS Basic, then MS DOS, then Windows, then Office and then on an on: Visual Basic. Visual Studio. Exchange. Outlook. IIS. ASP. IE. (Well, ok, sometimes we totally overstepped and were really sort of greedy and boring for a decade but, still, we were still trying to be true to that tools for users thing. Or so we told ourselves.)

“Microsoft is thrilled to explore the new avenues of interaction that the burgeoning tablet market has opened to us. We were the first advocate of the tablet as the next vital form-factor and we’re excited to be here today to present our software running on the first popular tablet: iPad.”

That’s a fair pitch. If I’d heard that from a Microsoft representative anywhere I’d think that’s as good a take, and as fair a spin, as they deserve. No lies, direct and grasping at the credibility they talked about but didn’t cement by shipping something great. In all: fair play.

Here’s a quote:

“Apple lives in an ecosystem. And it needs help from other partners. It needs to help other partners. And relationships that are destructive don’t help anybody in this industry as it is today.”

Steve Jobs, 1997

It’s possible that long time Apple watchers focus too much on the part about Apple needing help from its partners. And, to be sure, reducing that risk is a driving concern for the company. But the bit about Apple wanting to help other partners? That seems to go unnoticed. Didn’t Apple try to help other partners when the original iPhone relied so heavily on Google backend services? I’d argue they did — the introduction presentation of the iPhone has a good few minutes just showing off the Google Maps integration. Hell, Steve even prank called a Starbucks just to make the point.

But let’s focus on the key issue of this quotation, and let’s remember that this is just before Bill Gates shows up on a giant screen to “save Apple with a massive investment”:

“relationships that are destructive don’t help anybody”

Apple:

“Microsoft, if you want to invest in porting Office to the iPad then we really appreciate how much trouble that is for you. Tell you what — we’ll bump the Super Monkey-Ball guys, and the rhythm game guys, and the hack-and-slash sword guys and, you know what? We’ll do it old school. You and us? We’re going to bold the shit out of some text. On stage. Live.”

iBooks Author is a tool designed to enable authors of instructional, and other interactive content, to format their work specifically for distribution on iPad devices. In time these parameters may change but, for now, this is the purpose that iBooks Author serves.

If you are authoring your content directly in iBooks Author then I suggest to you that you’re doing it wrong. Create your work as you would have previously and then approach the idea of publishing it on the iBookstore as an opportunity to spruce up your presentation with interactive elements.

iBooks Author is a tool that allows you to leverage specific advantages of the iPad and iBooks 2. It is, categorically, not a tool for creating cross-platform “electronic books”. If you’d like to create those then Apple will be happy to provide a first-class experience for them. If you’d like to do something above and beyond that then consider iBooks Author.

Why the hell they opted for a restrictive EULA when they have such a terrific pitch is beyond me.

The iBooks Author EULA has been in the news recently. It has, in fact, bumped Romney and Gingrich out of the headlines and it’s all anyone is talking about. Everywhere. I just received an email from a lovely Nigerian professor who’d like to send me millions of dollars because he fears the iBooks Author EULA will confiscate it from him if he publishes his text book on implementing cold fusion. (Drinks on me at Macworld!) Allow me to scale this mountain of a molehill and defuse this tempest in a teapot.

There is an across the board consensus that the iBooks Author EULA, as currently written, is overly vague and can be understood to apply broadly to any and all content generated by the application. From there commentators fall, roughly, into one of two camps: Restrictions on output are inherently wrong and; The EULA as written will never be enforced. It’s not even that the two camps are in a real disagreement, it’s that one camp is dealing with the facts as they are now while the other is reading into the intent and projecting a better outcome.

I’d like to say that I’ve not seen an argument regarding this EULA that I disagree with but that’s not the case. I will say that I’ve yet to read a well reasoned opinion on the matter that I wholly disagree with. As a matter of personal opinion I believe that the intention of the EULA isn’t to restrict the distribution of text or PDF files generated by iBook Author. As written the EULA does suggest that they are. This should be clarified, as everyone else has already said.

The interesting thing, to me, is in the reactions we’re seeing. Let’s project this EULA issue into the software world and consider it in those terms. A new piece of Apple software has shipped and it exhibits behaviour that the vast majority of the most vocal users find to be faulty. The behaviour is a bug. What do we do?

To me the obvious course of action is to complain loudly about the bug and hope that Apple addresses it. (And file a Radar! Always file a Radar!) But we then get into the issue of intent.

I’m in agreement with Mike Ash and Dan Wineman — intent doesn’t matter when considering the practical implications of the choices that have been made. That said intent does matter if we’re hoping to read the tea-leaves to devine what might be. When examining what we believe to be faulty behaviour the perceived intention is invaluable. It’s the difference between a bug and a feature. A bug we expect to be fixed, a feature we expect to have to live with. Lion inverted scrolling.

I think the issue that hasn’t been addressed that is really at the heart of this is: why is iBooks Author free? The arguments for legally tying the output of iBooks Author to the iBookstore is that the application is free and that through sales of for-profit books Apple will recoup it’s investment. That’s very true and again I don’t disagree with that. My question then is, why does it have to be free? What’s wrong with the old-fashioned model of asking for money for something of value? If Final Cut Pro XII came out for free but required distribution via iCloudVideo would that be acceptable? It strikes me that the good old-fashioned buy-your-tools-and-your-work-is-your-own model works quite well. This change to giving away free tools but locking down (legally) what you can do with them doesn’t sit right with me.

The rebuttal is that there are plenty of tools that are de facto locked to their platforms. That’s true and it’s a good argument. Xcode basically only makes iOS and Mac OS X software. Visual Studio is similarly platform specific. But those are technical limitations, not blunt legal limitations.

My position is that there’s enough laws in place as it stands to prevent competitors implementing the functionality that’d be required to have, say, a Kindle Fire run (experience!) an iBooks Author generated .ibooks file. Now, obviously, I’m not a lawyer so what do I know, but if the future is platform specific content generation tools, locked down with legalese, then I think we’re going in the wrong direction.