Wow! Steve Jobs wants you to write web applications for the iPhone so that he can offer them to users.

Let me read that back to you:

Steve Jobs wants you to write web applications for the iPhone so that he can offer them to users.

Fantastic, thanks Steve!

On a related topic, I have to say something about John Gruber. Daring Fireball is a well written, frequently updated blog produced by Gruber, which deals with daily techno-happenings, much of which is Apple related.

Gruber himself is an educated Mac fanboy enthusiast (sorry John, but I can’t think of a better way to put it), but not an outrageous extremist or anything like that; he’s smart, which probably explains the lack of neener-neener which seems so common among the iLoveIt group. But despite his intelligence, and his well-stated logical arguments in favor of Steve Jobs’ continued position that he is entitled to make any decision he wants to with regard to his products, Gruber is missing one key component in most of his arguments, which he shrewdly hides behind other, less important premises.

What Apple is doing, by locking out third party competition, is anti-competitive. Whether it is with the iPhone, the iPod, iTunes, iWhatever, anti-competitive business practices are in fact illegal.

Gruber claims that users should not expect any support from Apple for unsupported actions, and that’s fine; Apple is under no obligation to support unsupported actions. But that also indirectly implies that when a consumer agrees to the licensing agreement when purchasing a product, it somehow makes anti-competitive business practices OK, which is wrong. And wrong in a court of law. When someone installs Windows they agree to a lengthy EULA, but that didn’t keep Microsoft from the loosing side of the courtroom. It won’t keep Apple from there either.

Granted, many of the first generation of frivolous law suits are just that. But the next generation of them might not be so, especially if at the other end are other companies with legitimate stake in the game. Apple’s market share has up until relatively recently been so marginal that Jobs’ “it’s mine and I’ll do whatever I want to” attitude affected no one aside from existing Apple enthusiasts, and was therefore of no consequence to the overall market. The more relevant to big business Apple becomes, the more big business moguls will insist it plays ball.

The problem here isn’t with people “hacking” their iPhones, and it’s not with Apple’s 1.1.1 update that bricks them. These are symptoms of the problem. The problem is that it cannot be left to Apple to decide what users can and cannot do with the software on their Apple-made devices. And this doesn’t apply solely to the iPhone, or even to Apple in general, it applies to any company engaged in anti-competitive behavior.

What if I don’t want to run Safari? This type of question has been asked time and time again of Microsoft and their bundling policies, some of which have been deemed anti-competitive. But here’s the kicker: Microsoft has never disallowed installation of software, it merely made it less appealing or more difficult (or tried to) by providing its own version of whatever software by default. Apple unilaterally disallows any third party software on the iPhone. Period.

How can I compare the iPhone to Windows? Isn’t this comparing apples and oranges? No, for two reasons.

First, the iPhone is one of a kind; there is (or was, maybe) nothing like it. It truly is innovative and will likely usher in a new mini-era of handheld computing. The only thing that can compare to the iPhone is a sophisticated operating system. Which brings us to the second point. It is indeed running Mac OS X. An argument that is premised on the fact that Apple isn’t selling the iPhone as a “computing device” but simply an “intelligent phone” or something along those lines is purely semantic, and, ultimately bogus. It is an operating system, it is a web browser, etc. Buying into that argument would then open the doors for Microsoft to repackage its Windows Operating System as Windows Smart Calculator to be exempted from anti-competitive litigation.

“But it’s just a smart calculator.”