Monday 30 January 2012

Dangers of outsourcing: Facebook coding theft


http://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-was-founded-2010-3?op=1

This shows clearly why outsourcing is very dangerous to the health of a company, especially high tech innovative companies. Also a lesson in trusting people with bad records. A thief is always a thief. How about facebook users? Do we still want to trust Mark Zuckerberg after what he had done to those around him?

At Last -- The Full Story Of How Facebook Was Founded
Nicholas Carlson | Mar. 5, 2010, 4:10 AM | 2,281,943 | 242

Description: Mark Zuckerberg
The origins of Facebook have been in dispute since the very week a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg launched the site as a Harvard sophomore on February 4, 2004. 
Then called "thefacebook.com," the site was an instant hit.  Now, six years later, the site has become one of the biggest web sites in the world, visited by 400 million people a month.
The controversy surrounding Facebook began quickly.  A week after he launched the site in 2004, Mark was accused by three Harvard seniors of having stolen the idea from them. 
This allegation soon bloomed into a full-fledged lawsuit, as a competing company founded by the Harvard seniors sued Mark and Facebook for theft and fraud, starting a legal odyssey that continues to this day.
New information uncovered by Silicon Alley Insider suggests that some of the complaints against Mark Zuckerberg are valid.  It also suggests that, on at least one occasion in 2004, Mark used private login data taken from Facebook's servers to break into Facebook members' private email accounts and read their emails--at best, a gross misuse of private information. Lastly, it suggests that Mark hacked into the competing company's systems and changed some user information with the aim of making the site less useful.
The primary dispute around Facebook's origins centered around whether Mark had entered into an "agreement" with the Harvard seniors, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and a classmate named Divya Narendra, to develop a similar web site for them -- and then, instead, stalled their project while taking their idea and building his own.
The litigation never went particularly well for the Winklevosses.
In 2007, Massachusetts Judge Douglas P. Woodlock called their allegations "tissue thin." Referring to the  agreement that Mark had allegedly breached, Woodlock also wrote, "Dorm room chit-chat does not make a contract." A year later, the end finally seemed in sight: a judge ruled against Facebook's move to dismiss the case. Shortly thereafter, the parties agreed to settle.
But then, a twist.
After Facebook announced the settlement, but before the settlement was finalized, lawyers for the Winklevosses suggested that the hard drive from Mark Zuckerberg's computer at Harvard might contain evidence of Mark's fraud. Specifically, they suggested that the hard drive included some damning instant messages and emails.
The judge in the case refused to look at the hard drive and instead deferred to another judge who went on to approve the settlement. But, naturally, the possibility that the hard drive contained additional evidence set inquiring minds wondering what those emails and IMs revealed.  Specifically, it set inquiring minds wondering again whether Mark had, in fact, stolen the Winklevoss's idea, screwed them over, and then ridden off into the sunset with Facebook.
Unfortunately, since the contents of Mark's hard drive had not been made public, no one had the answers.
But now we have some.
Over the past two years, we have interviewed more than a dozen sources familiar with aspects of this story -- including people involved in the founding year of the company. We have also reviewed what we believe to be some relevant IMs and emails from the period.  Much of this information has never before been made public.  None of it has been confirmed or authenticated by Mark or the company.
Based on the information we obtained, we have what we believe is a more complete picture of how Facebook was founded.  This account follows.
And what does this more complete story reveal?
We'll offer our own conclusions at the end.  But first, here's the story:

"We can talk about that after I get all the basic functionality up tomorrow night."
In the fall of 2003, Harvard seniors Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra were on the lookout for a web developer who could bring to life an idea the three say Divya first had in 2002: a social network for Harvard students and alumni. The site was to be called HarvardConnections.com.
The three had been paying Victor Gao, another Harvard student, to do coding for the site, but at the beginning of the fall term Victor begged off the project. Victor suggested his own replacement: Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard sophomore from Dobbs Ferry, New York.
Back then, Mark was known at Harvard as the sophomore who had built Facemash, a "Hot Or Not" clone for Harvard. Facemash had already made Mark a bit of a celebrity on campus, for two reasons.
The first is that Mark got in trouble for creating it. The way the site worked was that it pulled photos of Harvard students off of Harvard's Web sites. It rearranged these photos so that when people visited Facemash.com they would see pictures of two Harvard students and be asked to vote on which was more attractive. The site also maintained a list of Harvard students, ranked by attractiveness.
On Harvard's politically correct campus, this upset people, and Mark was soon hauled in front of Harvard's disciplinary board for students.  According to a November 19, 2003 Harvard Crimson article, he was charged with breaching security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. Happily for Mark, the article reports that he wasn't expelled.
The second reason everyone at Harvard knew about Facemash and Mark Zuckerberg was that Facemash had been an instant hit. The same Harvard Crimson story reports that after two weeks, "the site had been visited by 450 people, who voted at least 22,000 times." That means the average visitor voted 48 times.
Description: winklevoss twinsIt was for this ability to build a wildly popular site that Victor Gao first recommended Mark to Cameron, Tyler, and Divya. Sold on Mark, the Harvard Connection trio reached out to him. Mark agreed to meet.
They first met in an early evening in late November in the dining hall of Harvard College's Kirkland House.  Cameron, Tyler, and Divya brought up their idea for Harvard Connection, and described their plans to A) build the site for Harvard students only, by requiring new users to register with Harvard.edu email addresses, and B) expand Harvard Connection beyond Harvard to schools around the country.  Mark reportedly showed enthusiastic interest in the project.
Later that night, Mark wrote an email to the Winklevoss brothers and Divya: "I read over all the stuff you sent and it seems like it shouldn't take too long to implement, so we can talk about that after I get all the basic functionality up tomorrow night."
The next day, on December 1, Mark sent another email to the HarvardConnections team.  Part of it read, "I put together one of the two registration pages so I have everything working on my system now. I'll keep you posted as I patch stuff up and it starts to become completely functional."
These two emails sounded like the words of someone who was eager to be a part of the team and working away on the project.  A few days later, however, Mark's emails to the HarvardConnection team started to change in tone.  Specifically, they went from someone who seemed to be hard at work building the product to someone who was so busy with schoolwork that he had no time to do any coding at all.

December 4: "Sorry I was unreachable tonight. I just got about three of your missed calls. I was working on a problem set."

December 10: "The week has been pretty busy thus far, so I haven't gotten a chance to do much work on the site or even think about it really, so I think it's probably best to postpone meeting until we have more to discuss. I'm also really busy tomorrow so I don't think I'd be able to meet then anyway."

A week later: "Sorry I have not been reachable for the past few days. I've basically been in the lab the whole time working on a cs problem set which I"m still not finished with."
Finally, on January 8:
Sorry it's taken a while for me to get back to you. I'm completely swamped with work this week. I have three programming projects and a final paper due by Monday, as well as a couple of problem sets due Friday. I'll be available to discuss the site again starting Tuesday.

I"m still a little skeptical that we have enough functionality in the site to really draw the attention and gain the critical mass necessary to get a site like this to run…Anyhow, we'll talk about it once I get everything else done.
So what happened to change Mark's tune about HarvardConnection? Was he so swamped with work that he was unable to finish the project?  Or, as the HarvardConnection founders have alleged, was he stalling the development of HarvardConnection so that he could build a competing site and launch it first?

Our investigation suggests the latter.

As a part of the lawsuit against Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, the above emails from Mark have been public for years. What has never been revealed publicly is what Mark was telling his friends, parents, and closest confidants at the same time.

Let's start with a December 7th (IM) exchange Mark Zuckerberg had with his Harvard classmate and Facebook cofounder, Eduardo Saverin.  
"They made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them."
Former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel gets a lot of credit for being the first investor in Facebook, because he led the first formal Facebook round in September of 2004 with a $500,000 investment at a $5 million valuation.  But the real "first investor" claim to fame should actually belong to a Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg's named Eduardo Saverin.

To picture Eduardo, what you need to know is that he was the kid at Harvard who would wear a suit to class. He liked to give people the impression that he was rich -- and maybe somehow connected to the Brazilian mafia.  At one point, in an IM exchange, Mark told a friend that Eduardo -- "head of the investment society" -- was rich because "apparently insider trading isn't illegal in Brazil."
Eduardo Saverin wasn't directly involved with Facebook for long: During the summer of 2004, when Mark moved to Palo Alto to work on Facebook full time, Eduardo took a high-paying internship at Lehman Brothers in New York.  While Mark was still at Harvard, however, Eduardo appears to have bankrolled Facebook's earliest capital expenses, thus becoming its initial investor.

In January, however, Mark told a friend that "Eduardo is paying for my servers." Eventually, Eduardo would agree to invest $15,000 in a company that would, in April 2004, be formed as Facebook LLC.  For his money, Eduardo would get 30% of the company.
Eduardo was also involved in Facebook's earliest days, as a confidant of Mark Zuckerberg.
In December, 2003, a week after Mark's first meeting with the HarvardConnection team, when he was telling the Winklevosses that he was too busy with schoolwork to work on or even think about HarvardConnection.com, Mark was telling Eduardo a different story.  On December 7, 2003, we believe Mark sent Eduardo the following IM:
Check this site out: www.harvardconnection.com and then go to harvardconnection.com/datehome.php. Someone is already trying to make a dating site. But they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them. So I'm like delaying it so it won't be ready until after the facebook thing comes out.
This IM suggests that, within a week of meeting with the Winklevosses for the first time, Mark had already decided to start his own, similar project--"the facebook thing."  It also suggests that he had developed a strategy for dealing with his would-be competition: Delay developing it.
"I feel like the right thing to do is finish the facebook and wait until the last day before I'm supposed to have their thing ready and then be like look yours isn't as good"
A few weeks after the initial meeting with the HarvardConnection team, after Mark sent the IM to Eduardo Saverin talking about developing "the facebook thing" and delaying his development of HarvardConnection, Mark met with the HarvardConnection folks, Cameron, Tyler, and Divya, for a second time. 
This time, instead of meeting in the dining hall of Mark's residential hall, Kirkland House, the four met in Mark's dorm room. Divya is said to have arrived late.

In Kirkland House, the dorm rooms aren't laid out in cinder-block-cube style: Mark's room had a narrow hallway connecting it to his neighbor's. As Cameron and Tyler sat down on a couch in Mark's room, Cameron spotted something in the hallway. On top of a bookshelf there was a white board. It was the kind Web developers and product managers everywhere use to map out their ideas.
On it, Cameron read two words, "Harvard Connection." He got up to go look at it. Immediately, Mark asked Cameron to stay out of the hallway.
Eventually Divya arrived and the four of them talked about plans for Harvard Connection. One feature Mark brought up was designed to keep more popular and sought-after Harvard Connection users from being stalked and harassed by crowds of people.
In this second meeting, Mark still appeared to be actively engaged in developing Harvard Connection.  But he never showed the HarvardConnection folks any site prototypes or code.  And they didn't insist on seeing them.

During the weeks in which Mark was juggling the two projects in tandem, he also had a series of IM exchanges with a friend named Adam D'Angelo (above).

Adam and Mark went to boarding school together at Phillips Exeter Academy. There, the pair became friends and coding partners. Together they built a program called Synapse, a music player that supposedly learned the listener's taste and then adapted to it. Then, in 2002 Mark went to Harvard and Adam went to Cal Tech.  But the pair stayed in close touch, especially through AOL instant messenger. Eventually, Adam became Facebook's CTO.
Description: Harvard Yard at WinterThrough the Harvard Connection-Facebook saga and its aftermath, Mark kept Adam apprised of his plans and thoughts.

One purported IM exchange seems particularly relevant on the question of how Mark distinguished between the two projects--the "facebook thing" and "the dating site"--as well as how he was considering handling the latter:
Zuck: So you know how I'm making that dating site
Zuck: I wonder how similar that is to the Facebook thing
Zuck: Because they're probably going to be released around the same time
Zuck: Unless I fuck the dating site people over and quit on them right before I told them I'd have it done.
D'Angelo: haha
Zuck: Like I don't think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they knew it was for dating
Zuck: and I think people are skeptical about joining dating things too.
Zuck: But the guy doing the dating thing is going to promote it pretty well.
Zuck: I wonder what the ideal solution is.
Zuck: I think the Facebook thing by itself would draw many people, unless it were released at the same time as the dating thing.
Zuck: In which case both things would cancel each other out and nothing would win. Any ideas? Like is there a good way to consolidate the two.
D'Angelo: We could make it into a whole network like a friendster. haha. Stanford has something like that internally

Zuck: Well I was thinking of doing that for the facebook. The only thing that's different about theirs is that you like request dates with people or connections with the facebook you don't do that via the system.
D'Angelo: Yeah
Zuck: I also hate the fact that I'm doing it for other people haha. Like I hate working under other people. I feel like the right thing to do is finish the facebook and wait until the last day before I'm supposed to have their thing ready and then be like "look yours isn't as good as this so if you want to join mine you can…otherwise I can help you with yours later." Or do you think that's too dick?
D'Angelo: I think you should just ditch them
Zuck: The thing is they have a programmer who could finish their thing and they have money to pour into advertising and stuff. Oh wait I have money too. My friend who wants to sponsor this is head of the investment society. Apparently insider trading isn't illegal in Brazil so he's rich lol.
D'Angelo: lol
"I'm going to fuck them."
Eduardo Saverin and Adam D'Angelo were not the only people Mark discussed his Harvard Connection - Facebook situation with.  We believe he also had many IM exchanges about it with relatives and a close female Harvard friend. 
In January 2004, Mark met with the Winklevoss brothers and Divya Narendra for what would be the last time. The meeting was on January 14, 2004, and it was held at the same place Mark met with the HarvardConnection team for the first time -- in the dining hall of Mark's residence, Kirkland House.
By this point, Mark's site, thefacebook.com, wasn't complete, but he was working hard on it. He'd arranged for Eduardo Saverin to pay for his servers. He had already told Adam that "the right thing to do" was to not complete Harvard Connection and build TheFacebook.com instead.  He had registered the domain name.
He therefore had a choice to make: Tell Cameron, Tyler and Divya that he wanted out of their project, or string them along until he was ready to launch thefacebook.com.
Mark sought advice on this decision from his confidants. One friend told him, in so many words, you know me. I don't ever think anyone should do anything bad to anybody.
Mark and this friend also had the following IM exchange about how Mark planned to resolve the competing projects:
Friend: So have you decided what you're going to do about the websites?
Zuck: Yeah, I'm going to fuck them
Zuck: Probably in the year
Zuck: *ear
And so, it appears, he did.  (In a manner of speaking).
On January 14, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg met with Cameron, Tyler, and Divya for the last time. During the meeting at Kirkland House, Mark expressed doubts about the viability of HarvardConnection.com. He said he was very busy with personal projects and school work and that he wouldn't be able to work on the site for a while. He blamed others for the site's delays. 
He did not say that he was working on his own project and that he was not planning to complete the HarvardConnection site.
After the meeting, Mark had another IM exchange with the friend above. He told her, in effect, that he had wimped out. He hadn't been able to break the news to Cameron and Tyler, in part, he said, because he was "intimidated" by them. He called them "poor bastards."
So then what happened?
Three days earlier, on January 11, 2004, Mark had registered the domain THEFACEBOOK.COM.
On February 4, he opened the site to Harvard students.
On February 10, Cameron Winklevoss sent Mark a letter accusing him of breaching their agreement and stealing their idea.
In late May, after going through two more developers, Cameron, Tyler and Divya launched HarvardConnection as ConnectU, a social network for 15 schools.
On June 10, 2004, a commencement speaker mentioned the amazing popularity of Mark's site, thefacebook.com.
In the summer of 2004, Mark moved to Palo Alto to work on Facebook full time and soon received a $500,000 investment from Peter Thiel.
In September 2004, HarvardConnection, now called ConnectU, sued Mark Zuckerberg and the now-incorporated "Facebook" for allegedly breaching their agreement and stealing their idea.
In February 2008, Facebook and ConnectU agreed to settle the lawsuit.
In June 2008, ConnectU appealed the settlement in California's ninth district, accusing Facebook of trading its stock without disclosing material information. This appeal is on-going.
The $65 million question
When we described the specifics of this story to Facebook, the company had the following comment:
"We’re not going to debate the disgruntled litigants and anonymous sources who seek to rewrite Facebook’s early history or embarrass Mark Zuckerberg with dated allegations. The unquestioned fact is that since leaving Harvard for Silicon Valley nearly six years ago, Mark has led Facebook's growth from a college website to a global service playing an important role in the lives of over 400 million people."
On the latter point, we agree.  What Mark Zuckerberg has accomplished with Facebook over the past six years has been nothing short of amazing.
So, having revisited the founding of Facebook with additional information, what do we conclude?
First, we have seen no evidence of any formal contract between Mark Zuckerberg and the Winklevosses in which Mark agreed to develop Harvard Connection.
Second, any agreement the parties may have had--as well as most of the purported IMs and emails we have reviewed from the period--appear to have been at the level of, as Judge Ware described them, "dorm-room chit-chat." (Albeit interesting and entertaining chit-chat.)
Third, only a week after beginning development of Harvard Connection, which he referred to as "the dating site," Mark had begun work on a separate project -- "the facebook thing." Mark appears to have considered the products as competing for the attention of the same users, but he also appears to have regarded them as different in some key ways.
Fourth -- and because of this foreseen competition -- Mark does appear to have intentionally strung along the Harvard Connection folks with the goal of making his project, thefacebook.com, have a more successful launch.
Bottom line, we haven't seen anything that makes us think that, whatever Mark did to the Harvard Connection folks, it was worth more than the $65 million they received in the lawsuit settlement.  In fact, this seems like a huge sum of money considering that the entire dispute took place over two months in 2004 and that, in the six years since, Mark has built Facebook into a massive global enterprise.
That said, in the course of our investigation, we also uncovered two additional anecdotes about Mark's behavior in Facebook's early days that are more troubling. These episodes -- an apparent hacking into the email accounts of Harvard Crimson editors using data obtained from Facebook logins, as well as a later hacking into ConnectU -- are described in detail here.


Apple is not a firm of endearment

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html?pagewanted=print#

Despite not being a firm of endearment, it is still the most profitable. Despite charging hisg prices for its products, it still mistreats its workers, or rather its contractors.

You may think that conditions in China does not affect us in Malaysia but better think again. They will take away our jobs and salaries. Do you want to work as slaves in these factories and therefore can we fairly compete with these Chinese firms?

We cannot so if you do not want to lose your electronics jobs, then don't support Apple. It is safer in jobs that have nothing to do with electronics.

After watching the film, Social Network, I realise how immoral Mark Zuckerberg is. With this kind of personality behind Facebook, I don't think it will have a long term future. Its success is only due to Harvard students. There is nothing so special or unique about Facebook.

By giving away a lot of things for free, Google should be a model of a firm of endearment where all stakeholders are happy with them, especially their workers. We should all support Google+ then. Abandon Facebook. When their founders are unethical, we should not expect the company to really care about the interests of its customers.

Facebook is innovative in leading the way in Social Networking and help revolutions. Or was it Twitter? Or the Google executive? We should reward Facebook for that but in the long term, we should go for more ethical companies such as Google. Then go to Google+. It should be better and safer than Facebook. Facebook is already riddled with so many controversies with its security and privacy systems.

In the same way, we should abandon Apple. Go for Android. Whatever Apple has, we can always duplicate in other brands. Google may not be innovative enough at the moment, so we should learn and reward Apple for it, but it won't last forever.

I notice that it is the cruel people who are more innovative. The nicest people tend to be boring. But for long term relationship, we must stick to the nicest people on earth. It is for our longterm good.




Sunday 29 January 2012

Preventing workers from joining competitors is illegal

 Preventing workers from joining competitors is illegal. It is shown by this article. Supported by one of the CEOs.

"a 2007 note from Palm's chief executive to Apple's Steve Jobs, saying that an anti-poaching agreement would be "likely illegal."

 And these CEOs deny having an anti-poaching agreement, which imply they all agree that anti poaching agreement is illegal, but their defence that there is no written agreement is not valid. An agreement need not be in writing all the time.

Not even an agreement that will be illegal but also laws preventing workers from moving to other better paying jobs are also illegal.

This is just a concept of justice which is applicable to all justice systems all over the world, including Malaysia. Unless we don't want to follow a just system, instead follow the Malaysian way. Unfortunately, the constitution and the United Nations that Malaysia had become a member, require Malaysia to follow a just system. Unless Malaysia want to break the constitution, the highest law in Malaysia. Not even judgments made by corrupt judges can override the constitution. Sooner or later, these judges will get their just punishment for ignoring the constitution.

 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/27/us-apple-lawsuit-idUSTRE80Q27420120127

Steve Jobs told Google to stop poaching workers


Fri Jan 27, 2012 6:40pm EST
(Reuters) - Apple's Steve Jobs directly asked former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt to stop trying to recruit an Apple engineer, a transgression that threatened one junior Google employee's job, according to a court filing.
The 2007 email from Jobs to Schmidt was disclosed on Friday in the course of civil litigation against Apple Inc, Google Inc and five other technology companies. The proposed class action, brought by five software engineers, accuses the companies of conspiring to keep employee compensation low by eliminating competition for skilled labor.
In 2010, Google, Apple, Adobe Systems Inc, Intel Corp, Intuit Inc and Walt Disney Co's Pixar unit agreed to a settlement of a U.S. Justice Department probe that bars them from agreeing to refrain from poaching each other's employees.
According to an unredacted court filing made public in the civil litigation on Friday, the now-deceased Jobs emailed Schmidt in March 2007 about an attempt by a Google employee to recruit an Apple engineer. Schmidt was also an Apple board member at the time.
"I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this," Jobs wrote.
Schmidt forwarded Job's email onto other, undisclosed recipients.
"Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?" Schmidt wrote.
Google's staffing director responded that the employee who contacted the Apple engineer "will be terminated within the hour."
He added: "Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs."
Google spokeswoman Niki Fenwick said on Friday the company, "has always actively and aggressively recruited top talent."
Apple representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The tech defendants have asked a U.S. judge in San Jose, California to quickly dismiss the civil lawsuit, arguing that the companies engaged in bilateral anti-poaching deals to protect collaboration. The companies did not participate in an "overarching conspiracy," they argued in filings.
But at a court hearing this week, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh said the civil lawsuit will proceed, although it may be split up into multiple potential class actions.
Among the revelations stemming from the civil litigation is a 2007 note from Palm's chief executive to Apple's Steve Jobs, saying that an anti-poaching agreement would be "likely illegal.
The latest court filing also refers to a 2007 note from Intel chief executive Paul Otellini discussing that company's agreement with Google.
"Let me clarify. We have nothing signed," Otellini wrote. "We have a handshake 'no recruit' between eric and myself. I would not like this broadly known."
Intel representative Sumner Lemon said on Friday the company, "disagrees with the allegations contained in the private litigation related to recruiting practices and plans to conduct a vigorous defense."
The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California is In Re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, 11-cv-2509.
(Reporting By Dan Levine; editing by Tim Dobbyn and Andre Grenon)

Tuesday 17 January 2012

 It is the large amount of content, either songs or applications that made Apple products so powerful. Similarly for Microsoft products. Unfortunately, Microsoft has forgotten how it managed to be so successful when it abandoned its content publishers.

 For a worst disaster, is the OLPC program. It tried to develop a program to help publishers publish ebooks for this book but it was shot down. It is a pity indeed. Without any education available, OLPC will be useless an an educational tool. You can equip it with fancy emails, browsers and brilliant educational tools and software, but without any content, they are useless indeed.

 Teachers are asked to scan their own notes and then learn how to use these educational software in order to present these lectures. I had an experience in one such software at UMS.  I still have the manual for it but now I can't even remember its name. It is simpler to just use emails for interactive e-learning. I believe it is based on Mundus but had been renamed because it was modified for UMS.

The way to solve this problem is actually very simple but people just don't believe what I say. Suffice to say that, you can solve it by copying Apple. Do what Apple has done. Apple didn't solve it by providing the tools for conversion. They simply make it available to publishers and documenting it well. Of course they improve it, but these improvements are very subjective. Most of the tools are already available. Just package them together and made available as a one stop methodology to create software for Apple in a fixed standard way.

But Apple made them available in a central store that everyone can access. Even now, I can download any song that I want but I have to search for them. Most people don't have the expertise and time to search for these songs.

The hackers that use the Windows, Androids and OLPCs, may be good at looking for songs and ebooks, but for the majority of users, they don't have the time and willingness to do it the hard way. Apple solved it for them. Does Apple use any special tool?  No. They just choose proven and tested tools, and package and document them to be a standard for everyone to follow.


 http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/01/apple-digital-destroy-textbook/

Apple To Announce Tools, Platform To ‘Digitally Destroy’ Textbook Publishing

Apple to announce tools, platform to "digitally destroy" textbook publishing
Apple is slated to announce the fruits of its labor on improving the use of technology in education at its special media event on Thursday, January 19. While speculation has so far centered on digital textbooks, sources close to the matter have confirmed to Ars that Apple will announce tools to help create interactive e-books—the “GarageBand for e-books,” so to speak—and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users.
Along with the details we were able to gather from our sources, we also spoke to two experts in the field of digital publishing to get a clearer picture of the significance of what Apple is planning to announce. So far, Apple has largely embraced the ePub 2 standard for its iBooks platform, though it has added a number of HTML5-based extensions to enable the inclusion of video and audio for some limited interaction. The recently-updated ePub 3 standard obviates the need for these proprietary extensions, which in some cases make iBook-formatted e-books incompatible with other e-reader platforms. Apple is expected to announce support for the ePub 3 standard for iBooks going forward.

GarageBand for e-books

At the same time, however, authoring standards-compliant e-books (despite some promises to the contrary) is not as simple as running a Word document of a manuscript through a filter. The current state of software tools continues to frustrate authors and publishers alike, with several authors telling Ars that they wish Apple or some other vendor would make a simple app that makes the process as easy as creating a song in GarageBand.
Our sources say Apple will announce such a tool on Thursday.
And Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis agrees that such a move would be very likely. MacInnis previously worked on education projects at Apple before leaving the company in 2009 to pursue his own ideas about creating interactive digital books. Inkling currently offers a variety of digital textbooks with interactive features, including the ability to share notes with classmates and instructors, via an iPad app.
“When you think about what Apple is doing… they are selling tens of thousands of iPads into K-12 institutions,” MacInnis told Ars. “What are they doing with those iPads? They don’t really replace textbooks, because there’s not very much content on offer,” he said.
Don’t expect that content to come directly from Apple, however. “Practically speaking, Apple does not want to get into the content publishing business,” MacInnis said. Like the music and movie industries, Apple has instead built a distribution platform as well as hardware to consume it—but Apple isn’t a record label or production studio.
But what Apple does provide is industry-leading tools for content production, such as Logic or Final Cut Pro, to help create content. The company also produces tools like GarageBand or iMovie that make such production accessible to a much wider audience.
Will Apple launch a sort of GarageBand for e-books? “That’s what we believe you’re about to see,” MacInnis told Ars (and our other sources agree). “Publishing something to ePub is very similar to publishing web content. Remember iWeb? That iWeb code didn’t just get flushed down the toilet—I think you’ll see some of [that code] repurposed.”

Mobile, social learning

Technology-in-education expert Dr. William Rankin also believes digital books will expand with tools that will enable social interactions among textbook users. Rankin, who serves as Director of Educational Innovation of Abilene Christian University and has extensively researched the use of mobile devices in the classroom, was one of three authors of a white paper on the effects of digital convergence on learning titled “Code/X,” published in 2009.
In that document, Rankin and his colleagues laid out their vision for the future of learning, which included an always-on, always-networked digital device called a “Talos.” That device turned out to be very similar to the iPad that Apple announced just six months later.
“What we saw coming was a change in the kinds of places that learning would happen,” Rankin told Ars. Since the device would always be with the student, it would give her access to information anytime and anywhere. “For that, you need a different kind of book.”
Such digital texts would let students interact with information in visual ways, such as 3D models, graphs, and videos. They would also allow students to create links to additional texts, audio, and other supporting materials. Furthermore, students could share those connections with classmates and colleagues.
“What we really believe is important is the role of social networking in a converged learning environment,” Rankin told Ars. “We’re already seeing that in Inkling’s platform, and Kno‘s journaling feature. Future digital texts should allow students to layer all kind of other data, such as pictures, and notes, and then share that with the class or, ideally, anyone.”
Exactly how what Apple announces on Thursday will impact digital publishing isn’t certain, however.
“Think about how meaningful simply authoring and publishing to an iPad will be for K-12,” MacInnis said. “However, it might not be great for molecular biology.”
MacInnis sees Apple as possibly up-ending the traditional print publishing model for the low-end, where basic information has for many years remained locked behind high textbook prices. Apple can “kick up dust with the education market,” which could then create visibility for platforms like Inkling. This could then serve as a sort of professional Logic-type tool for interactive textbook creation complement to Apple’s “GarageBand for e-books.”
“There will be a spectrum of tools and consumers, and we will continue to fit on that spectrum,” MacInnis opined. “I don’t know if the publishing industry will react to it with fear or enthusiasm.”

Steve Jobs’ pet project

We know that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was working on addressing learning and digital textbooks for some time, according to Walter Issacson’s biography. Jobs believed that textbook publishing was an “$8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction.”
According to our sources close to his efforts, however, Jobs’ personal involvement was perhaps more significant that even his biography purports. Jobs worked on this project for several years, and our understanding is that the final outcome was slated to be announced in October 2011 in conjunction with the iPhone 4S. Those plans were postponed at the last minute, perhaps due to Jobs’ imminent death.
Despite the delay, however, ACU’s Rankin believes the time is right for a change to happen in the field. “We’re headed toward a completely digital future at ACU,” he told Ars. “A recent study showed that 82 percent of all higher education students nationwide will come to campus with a smartphone. We need to have resources and tools ready for these mobile, connected students.”
Photograph by Casey Fleser