[narag]

The divide described in the article is very much culturally enforced as much as economically.

Statements of this kind trouble me every time I see them, last time yesterday in the discussion about Greece.

I guess Marx's ideas aren't very popular over here. But implying that economy and culture need to be mentioned separately seems at least a little naive.

More fundamentally, you're ignoring the huge difference in power between consumers (in this case the programmers) and the people that create the tools and take them to market.

[jarcane]

Actually, what I mean by that is rather the difference in power between the guys doing the coding, and the guys making the business decisions.

Both tend to enforce that divide, but for very different reasons; the coders for cliquish reasons as I described, and the business guys like Apple for the reasons in the original link.

[narag]

The coders can't really enforce anything. We have opinions and fall in groupthink indeed. But the mere fact that there are different tools is obviously caused by the people and organizations that create them.