Inside the mind and heart of Venkatesh Sridhar

Recently, Apple shipped out an update via iTunes that included the installation of Safari, the default browser on the Mac OS X, which is also available for Windows. Now, if you read it once again, with a bit of concentration you would see that, Apple went ahead and included the installation file and also pre-selected it for the user. (Photo Courtesy CNET)

As you can see in the image alongside, a 22.65 MB installation file for Safari was included in the update. This lead to a lot of uproar in the blogosphere led by Mozilla’s CEO John Lilly, who went so far as to say that Apple was pushing malware to its customers.

Though, I do not completely agree that Apple was pushing malware, but I strongly believe what Apple did with this update was ethically wrong, the reason why is that, a majority of users will not bother to read through the text and would just implicitly go ahead and install both the items. Now, imagine that a 22.65 mb file has taken that much bandwidth plus the time for something the user may rarely use. I mean, if someone really wants to use Safari, then they will go over to Apple’s website and download it, install it and use Safari.

This has been widely criticized in the blogosphere, because many are livid at Apple’s tactics and see this as misusing the dominance of the iPod+iTunes Platform. As you know, anyone who owns an iPod or an iPhone has to use iTunes to sync content between your PC/Mac to your iPod or iPhone. Now, whenever you install iTunes, you install the Apple Software Update, which is like the Windows update all PC users are very familiar with.

Now, the job of a software updater should be just that - update software. Now, all software on all Operating Systems have bugs - a software update allows the vendor to address it.

John Lilly explains it better in his post about the Safari fiasco:

As you all know I have been spending quite some time over at Mutiny, reading a variety of blogs that are of interest to me. One such blog was titled, Open letter to Ms. Sonia Gandhi by Chacko. In the post, Chacko asks about Mrs. Sonia Gandhi’s views on the strike organized in Kerala, India by the UDF, a political alliance led by the Congress against the policies of the LDF government, an alliance of all Left parties in the state of Kerala.

It was against the price rises of rice and other basic commodities in the state of Kerala. This despite the fact that the Congress heads the Union Government in New Delhi. Now, the crux of the matter is that Chacko laments about the fact that Rahul Gandhi, who is poised to be the next Congress leader and is projected as the next generation of the Congress, does not list his email address in his Lok Sabha (the lower house of Indian Parliament) profile page. This despite, Rahul Gandhi’s interests being the Internet. Now, any 4 year old kid today knows how to use e-mail, chat and surf the net. And I am sure someone whose interest is Internet surely would have an email id. And also every leader in the Lok Sabha is allocated an email id which is yourname@sansad.nic.in (Sansad means Parliament in Hindi, NIC stands for National Informatics Center, which is responsible for all Government domain and Internet services and .in stands for the country Top Level Domain of India.), so Sonia Gandhi’s email is soniagandhi@sansad.nic.in, which is where Chacko sent his email to.

Maybe Rahul did not want to share his email id for the fear of ’spam’ from the people of India, who by the way he is supposed to represent. Maybe he should have just shared his email anyways which leader would read his own mails will be handled by some secretary any ways unless of course you are President Abdul Kalam, who as everyone knows was known to respond to his emails and who by the way has his own website where he talks about his thoughts and idea, no political agenda bullshit.

Now, I digress, why am I blogging about all this with a post title of Nehru Dynasty: Why should we not ask questions?