The government, after pressure from other parties in parliament, have announced that the election has been postponed a month so that the COVID-19 clusters can be addressed so that voters can feel safer turning out to vote. I find it funny how those parties that put pressure are convincing themselves that it gives them room to maneuverer – the sad situation is that rather than National taking advantage of the extra month to clarify their message they’re doubling down and triple down on their watered down Kiwi-ised version of Trumpism and it is working out as successfully as you imagine – like a lead balloon.

It appears that there is another software company going to take a run at the ‘wall gardened’ model that Android and iOS have used since the beginning:

I’ve been a critic of the whole store based model for quite some time – the percentage is too high when you consider the amount it costs in terms of bandwidth and storage used. As I noted in a reddit post I made on this very subject:

The ridiculous part is that Apple is quite happy with allowing Citrix Workspace which allows remote access to applications but they won’t allow cloud gaming? I mean, they’re essentially the same thing except instead of productivity applications being used it is games. Regarding future revenue, ultimately it is Apple who have decided to constrict themselves – they could have built out a great portfolio of middleware aimed at creatives, engineers, scientists by using their war chest to buy names like Maple, Mathlab, Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher, Hype, OmniGroup, Dassault Systèmes (bring Solidworks to macOS) etc. and developing a cloud based services such as custom domain hosting with full MDM management in the cloud to gear towards small to medium businesses. There are opportunities they could have made for themselves which would have voided this paranoia around clipping the ticket as people went through the AppStore but they decided not too – now they’re getting attention by anti-competition regulators because of that.

What is the alternative? They’ve already got notarisation which they use for macOS – make notarisation compulsory for third party side loaded applications so then it is easier to load them and the ability to remove them if it turns out that the application is doing something dodgy. Allow people to drag and drop applications into iTunes to install it on an iPhone. If you want people to use your services then you should be trying to make it as desirable as possible by reducing barriers, reducing costs and creating a business model at Apple that doesn’t depend on screwing over third parties all for the sake of ‘doubling service revenue’ (which Tim Cook promised in 2017 (and delivered – but I ask, at what cost?).

Apple seem to have an aversion beyond doing the least amount humanly possible – there is an opportunity to carve out a niche in the PC industry for scientists, engineers, creative types which Microsoft has neglected via their mishandling of Windows 10 – an opportunity to provide cloud services and software along with selling hardware and professional support for said hardware at the high end market who are happy to pay through the nose for 3 hour replacement part on site repairs. There is an opportunity to take iCloud beyond what it is today to custom domain hosting for the education market, small to medium businesses, cloud based MDM management etc. Again, such an investment would yield significant revenue without the political fall out associated with having a walled garden model that involves squeezing as much revenue out of third parties like a train conductor demanding payment for a new ticket every time the train goes past another train station.