[telemachos]

I'll concede that the claim does not need to be moral, but it should, at least, be a claim about what ought to be or what one ought to do.

But the author meets this standard. For example, he points out that Jobs says, in effect, that Adobe should have moved their Carbon apps to Cocoa, even though Apple hasn't done so in some cases.

[pohl]

Note that you have to use the weasel-phrase "in effect" to put words in the mouth of Jobs and claim that "the author meets this standard". If you're so certain he's met the standard, provide an actual quotation rather than a straw man.

Jobs made no such statement. Rather, he observed that Adobe was very slow in passing Apple's platform improvements on to its customers, and the implication here is that it would be unwise for Apple to allow middleware to put Apple in a position where Adobe could do the same thing again for thousands of apps.

But he made no claim about what Adobe ought to have done, or should have done. Rather, he gave a reason for the policy decisions that Apple has made.

[telemachos]

Here is Steve Jobs verbatim: And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

What the author points out is that it's odd (hypocritical?) for Jobs to pick on Adobe as the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X when Apple itself has not finished that transition (iTunes) and was very slow to do so in some cases (Finder).

I did use "in effect" to avoid going back and getting a quotation. I was lazy. But the quotation is there. I think it's overkill to describe me as using a straw man argument.

[pohl]

The author is wrong here, because that sentence exists to support the decision to not allow Adobe to interpose themselves between Apple's platform APIs and developers. Neither the Finder nor iTunes presented an impediment to improving the platform because neither of them interpose in any significant manner. That they have managed to bring MacOS X this far without touching them is evidence of this.

Regardless, Apple's own development is under Apple's own control. The current question is why they are not willing to be at the mercy of a vendor that is not only beyond Apple's control, but also has an established history of lagging. You may not like their decision, but it is prudent, consistent with their stated values, and consistent with their actions.

The author did not understand the function of this paragraph, and based his attack on a faulty interpretation.

I'm surprised that so many denizens of HN seem to be having trouble with the concept of a chain of dependencies, and how that makes the cases of iTunes and the Finder very different.