The following article is from the South Wind Window, written by Hu Yong
Steve Jobs celebrated the tenth anniversary of his death. Chinese published many nostalgic articles in the media, including how he polished products, leveraged marketing, subverted industries, reshaped management and even influenced life. One tech media outlet made an album like this: "Remembering Jobs: What Should We Commemorate Him?", and another tech media listed Jobs's list of "changes" (he changed from computers to software, from publishing to music, from advertising to retail, and so on), and asked: Ten years later, what are we going to change?
I thought the biggest change Jobs had brought us was the loss of the classical Internet. In this sense, he is the biggest "sinner" in the history of the Internet.
Compared to Jobs, I was an insignificant person. Some readers will surely say that you are so sensational that you cannot damage jobs's greatness in the slightest.
I certainly agree that Jobs was "the greatest business leader of our time," and that jobs' starlight was still the brightest even in Silicon Valley, a place full of supertech superstars.
But what is his greatness? In short: he started the PC (and here, I mean the PC in general, not the IBM PC) and subverted the PC. In the 1990s, Silicon Valley had little to do with mobile technology. Today, Silicon Valley has become the epicenter of the mobile revolution. All this is because Apple developed the iPhone. The iPhone and iPad together ended the PC era.
January 9, 2007, is perhaps the most memorable day of our century over the past two decades. On this day, Jobs took out the iPhone, and since then Apple's smartphone has integrated the computer and the mobile phone. As a result, many changes are locked in a small mobile phone.
On January 9, 2007, Jobs unveiled the revolutionary original iPhone at the Marscony Convention Center in San Francisco
Meanwhile, Jobs did something the following year called Apple's Central App Store. He himself was surprised by the development of the app store, saying: "I don't know if Apple's app store will one day become a $1 billion market." By 2019, the number of apps in Apple's App Store has exceeded 2 million, downloads have exceeded 170 billion, and users have spent more than $130 billion on it.
The app store spawned a new economic activity, and everyone had to do business in the app. From this point of view, Jobs is one of the most contributory people in the history of human technology development, and he single-handedly subverted our way of life.
As a beneficiary of mobile life-changing, users should thank Jobs. As a successful gold digger of the mobile Internet tide, many entrepreneurs should thank Jobs. No wonder that in September 2018, when Meituan-Dianping went public in Hong Kong, Wang Xing "specially thanked" Steve Jobs and "thanked him for bringing a new era of smart phones and mobile Internet."
However, this new era has its own B-side. Although huge end-user benefits are generated in the process of migrating to mobile applications, significant disadvantages arise from them. In our original vision, the Internet was open and connected, but in Jobs's hands it became a "garden" with walls.
The Internet, with the World Wide Web at its core, is open, connected, transparent, and accessible; in contrast, the mobile Internet is closed, especially apple's strategy in the mobile space has been described as aiming to create a "fully integrated closed system" in which the company "maintains a high degree of control over the entire product ecosystem."
These differences in openness are reflected in the re-emergence of the "walled garden" model in the mobile internet. The metaphor of a "walled garden" comes from the early days of dial-up Internet access, when Internet service providers tried to confine users to their own proprietary content, rather than positioning their businesses as gateways to the entire network. This early "walled garden" gradually came to an end, but in the context of the mobile internet, the "walled garden" model has made a comeback, reinforced by the explosion of mobile applications bypassing the World Wide Web.
The application is designed in part to compensate for the various flaws based on mobile network access. While it can provide an efficient and user-friendly experience, the mobile app model represents an internet ecosystem that is even less open than the World Wide Web. For example, major app stores (whether it's the iTunes App Store or Google Play) play a powerful gatekeeper role, while content and apps on the World Wide Web bypass intermediaries. This is a fundamental change in the dissemination of content and applications.
Some critics argue that limiting the range of available content sources and applications could stifle innovation. For example, apps are often only available through proprietary app stores that control the openness of their platforms to developers and restrict users from switching and linking between different apps. Developers are forced to customize their applications for each platform, which leads to additional costs. Once an app is approved by the app store, it is affected by rankings and feature lists, which makes it particularly difficult for new apps to gain visibility and win over the competition.
The terminal devices of the mobile Internet themselves are also fundamentally different in terms of openness. Mobile handheld devices, including tablets, are far less open than personal computers. Unlike personal computers, mobile phones are mainly closed, proprietary technologies that make it difficult to adapt and program for different purposes. Users who access the Internet through more closed, more difficult-to-program devices do not have the ability to improve network services or benefit accordingly. Ironically, Apple computers were born with a hacker spirit, while Apple phones allowed Apple to say no to any app based on its own likes and dislikes. Apple turned itself into the satire of its famous "1984" ad.
As a result of the "walled garden" platform, today's Internet is cut into several huge "electronic concentration camps", each with a huge monster crouching at the door, and people are locked in electronic concentration camps, thinking that it is a fragrant garden everywhere.
What we put in our pockets has literally become a grenade, because today you have your money in your phone, your pass, your dating history, and all the proof that you can prove who you are... If you lose your phone, you will not be able to move, and with a mobile phone, you will be terrified.
Jobs has completely turned the Internet into its opposite. When a tool dominates us so thoroughly, do we understand what it means?
As Carl Popper put it in Open Societies and Their Enemies: "Great men can make big mistakes. "If you ask me, what should I change in the next decade? I would answer: bluntly criticize those recognized as part of our technological heritage, tear down the "walled gardens", and rebuild the open internet.