Sorry, that war was fought and lost won with the iPhone and iPad.
If anything, Microsoft is better in the sense that it offers more share of the app cost to the developers and also doesn't charge tithes like Apple does on content.
This is part of why I bought an HP Touchpad when it wasn't on the fire sale, and a Palm Pre+ before that. The Palm folks (even at HP now) not only don't care that you're hacking their device, they actually actively encourage it. They've gone out of their way to provide an "oh shit" button for when you've completely frazzled the bootloader and nothing else works. The Touchpad runs webOS, Android, and Ubuntu, and HP/Palm doesn't give a shit.
Now that their OS is open source, too, I'd love to see the rise of HP/Palm in the hacker community. They're not just accepting of hackers, they actively encourage it in all aspects.
"If anything, Microsoft is better in the sense that it offers more share of the app cost to the developers and also doesn't charge tithes like Apple does on content."
These are just value propositions from an also ran.
Apple takes a cut on sales because that's what store's do. If I sell cereal to a supermarket and you walk in and buy a box, the store does not give me all of that money. Why? Because the store worked hard to get that customer to walk in. Similarly Apple worked hard to make ITMS and App Store work, bringing millions of customers to the apps and music. And no one calls the supermarket's cut a tithe either.
Why support MS because they came later, copied the successful innovation and undercut it by a few %? Supporting the company doing the innovating seems like a better path to incentivizing other companies to innovate new products and markets instead of just copying what's successful.
>Apple takes a cut on sales because that's what store's do. If I sell cereal to a supermarket and you walk in and buy a box, the store does not give me all of that money. Why? Because the store worked hard to get that customer to walk in. Similarly Apple worked hard to make ITMS and App Store work, bringing millions of customers to the apps and music. And no one calls the supermarket's cut a tithe either.
The tithe reference is to the content, not the cut of the cost of an app, which Apple neither hosts nor delivers, but takes a 30% cut of.
Also, why can't your argument extend to ISPs? They have done all the hard work getting the customer, why shouldn't they be able to charge YouTube for allowing them to show ads to their customers?
If anything, Microsoft is better in the sense that it offers more share of the app cost to the developers and also doesn't charge tithes like Apple does on content.