Apped

With OS X Lion Apple Inc. is making Macs a lot more like its mobiles. Fortune Magazine's CEO of the decade has chiseled out a whole new web experience for the users of Apple products, one based around a highly controlled 'Apple' experience trough apps rather than trough traditional internet use. The upside of this is that Apple's quality control provides a seamless, pleasant, and relatively safe internet experience. The HUGE downside is that it leaves out anything that doesn't fit in Apple's vision of your online future.

Much of the debate about the pros and cons of a 'limited' internet experience is waged by my fellow loudmouths in the IT industry. "Users", meanwhile, vote with their wallets and make Apple stock a stratospheric phenomenon. Clearly, it works well for most people, in spite of its drawbacks.

I, for one, like what Apple is offering on weekdays and tinker around with Tux over the weekend, allowing me do have a much richer, albeit more difficult computing experience mostly for the sake of learning cool geeky things about computing. 

For my parents however, Apple's approach is a godsend. It allows them to have all the front end usefulness of computers and the internet, without having to worry about the complexities of the back end. That they lose a lot of the power that the technology is capable of is much less of an issue, as they don't miss what they've never had.

Although Apple is certainly pulling the App bandwagon, the popularity of this vehicle is increasing rapidly and there is no software or mobile devices company that refuses to hop on, and app stores are definitely the new business model in both industries. Nokia has the Ovi store, there is of course the Android Marketplace, and even old lets-screw-up-on-the-latest-trend Microsoft has the Windows Web App Gallery. I can only speculate what happens when this trend collides with the rapidly increasing use of virtualization in the enterprise sphere. More on that later.

Apps are here to stay, and computing will become more useful to more people yet again.