Why the iPad Is So Revolutionary

As a developer, it's a bit sad losing the ability to come up with crazy plugins and daemons and system-level utilities, but I believe it's a trade-off worth making.

What people are overlooking is that the Internet is an integral part of the iPhone OS, and it is the part of the OS you can tinker with to your heart's delight.

If you want to invent a new scripting language or background service or something, you're still totally free to do that, but you're going to have to run it on a Web server.

If you want total freedom on the client side, then write a Web app. You're simply no longer going to be able to tempt users into installing software that corrupts their computer.

So, in the end, what it comes down to is that iPad offers new metaphors that will let users engage with their computers with dramatically less friction. That gives me, as a developer, a sense of power and potency and creativity like no other. It makes the software market feel wide open again, like no one's hegemony is safe. How anyone can feel underwhelmed by that is beyond me.

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