People who attended the “D6: All Things Digital” event in May know that I asked Jeff Bezos an impertinent question. Why, I asked, did Amazon insist on using up the primo spot on my landing page to promote Kindle, when I already owned one and Amazon knows that I own one. (For those who haven’t taken the plunge, Amazon actually pre-configures your Kindle with your customer information when they ship it to you. So presumably they know who has one and therefore doesn’t need to be promoted to buy another one.) Bezos’s response was classic: “Because,” he said, “you only have one.”

Bezos sent me an email today, asking me to check out Amazon.com. Lo and behold, the ad for Kindle had been replaced with what you see here. Promotion for Kindle content based on my history of purchases (I’ve bought both Elmore Leonard and Arturo Reverte-Perez titles on my Kindle previously. Plus, of course, an exhortation to buy more Kindles for friends and family.

Now that’s great customer service! And with a sense of humor! :-)

I’ve been a loyal fan of Apple products for close to 30 years; by “fan”, I’m serious: I bought at least one of every major product that Apple ever launched. (I’m on my tenth iPod already). My company, Spectrum Holobyte (already two years old when the Macintosh was launched), was one of the first Macintosh developers. I fondly remember the great support the Apple evangelist team gave to third party developers and how they embraced the creative products that developers were developing for their budding new Macintosh. Who could forget that great 1984 ad where a young athlete throws her hammer through that big Orwellian screen to smash “big brother.” Apple has always represented the freedom from the dominant control by IBM (then) and Microsoft (now). Apple users have always prided themselves in their ability to think differently than Windows users and have believed that Steve Jobs was the savior to an industry who had lost its way.

Unfortunately, Apple is beginning to act more and more like big brother itself.

Like the State in George Orwell’s 1984, Apple is using iTunes as a tool to control their users behavior. As has been widely reported, with its 1.1.1 version of the iPhone software, Apple purposely crippled iPhones that had had third party applications installed or had been modified by their users. Apple claims that they are doing this to protect users from applications that may damage their iPhones or threaten the quality of service. Sounds altruistic, but the truth is that Apple hurt their users more than they protected them.

Apple didn’t just reset users’ phones or paralyze specific third party applications; if the phones had been modified in any way, they proactively and purposely crippled those iPhones by turning them into useless bricks. (If the phones weren’t modified, Apple removed any offending software and returned the iPhone to a default, factory state.) Apple’s policy is that they will not reactivate disabled phones; instead Apple requires the owners to buy whole new phones. They are aggressively punishing not only the developers of these apps but users who thought that they had in fact “purchased” their phones. It looks like the only protection iPhone users need is from Apple itself.

Imagine if GM crippled your car if you modified your car with a third party accessory or if Dell decided to shut down your computer because you used a hard disk that you bought from Fry’s Electronics instead of from Dell. Imagine if Microsoft forced you to use IE and if you used Safari, they would cripple Windows and de-authorize your OS. Imagine if Sony used a DRM that…oh yeah, they did that and look what happened to them.

I have no problem with Apple telling users that third party applications will not be supported and may become incompatible in the future. I don’t have a problem with Apple protecting its users by locking out third party application that are known to cause damage either to the phone or to the network. But bricking users’ iPhones is vicious, unacceptable and should be challenged in the courts.

In 2005, at the Stanford University’s commencement address, Steve Jobs challenged the young graduates. He told them, “don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.” He told them to stay “hungry and stay foolish.”

Apple believes it is at war with those who try to develop native applications and those who are attempting to unlock their phones. This week in the United Kingdom, Jobs said: “It’s a cat-and-mouse game. We try to stay ahead. People will try to break in, and it’s our job to stop them breaking in.” That doesn’t sound hungry to me, but it does sounds awfully foolish. What is it, now, that separates Steve Jobs from the movie-studio and record-label executives who act as though customers are the biggest problem they have?

For years, Steve had told the world of the dangers of leaving the future of computing in the hands of companies like Microsoft. Apple was supposed to dawn a new age of computing and free “the rest of us” from the tyranny of the incumbents. My question is: is Steve acting more like the heroine savior he once aspired to be or more like the tyrant he despised in his famous 1984 ad?

The news this weekend is that InfoWorld will not be printed anymore. I was editor twice, in 1983-84 and again 1991-96, so this seems like it would be sad. But it’s actually anti-climatic and precisely for the reason that makes being a VC now so much fun: computers don’t matter anymore.

InfoWorld was fun because computers did matter. Personal computers mattered in the eighties; every week new models and features came out and it was exciting to participate in the reporting of those events. Networked computers mattered in the nineties and it was fun to be a key evaluator of new products for enterprises. Now that stuff is just a commodity: Personally, I’ve stopped caring about which processor Intel is making and am way beyond caring about new versions of Windows or new client applications. Instead, the action has moved entirely to network based services delivered over the internet.

I shudder to think that I even thought it was important to forecast in 1991 that the last mainframe would be unplugged in 1996. Sure, I was wrong and mainframes kept plugging away and, indeed, are continuing to plug away as we speak. But does anybody care, except the people who sell them and buy them and have to keep them running?

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