Apple, say it ain’t so

I realize full well that the fine folks at Apple tend to be control freaks.  It’s hard to produce consistently good user experiences, as Apple does, without being a control freak.  But the folks at Apple appear to be drinking too much coffee / koolaid / other problematic beverage if the latest rumors about Apple slapping NDA notifications on iPhone App rejection letters is true.

So let’s see; a community of increasingly vocal people are complaining about a particular situation, and rather than trying to fix the situation to at least partially address their concerns you’ve instead decided to try to just stop them complaining.  Yes, that’s worked so well in the past.

That move, if it is indeed true, seems particularly boneheaded when Google/T-Mobile are holding a press conference to hype the G1 and attempting to see how many times they can say the word “open” while still having their sentences make some vague amount of sense (watching the press conference footage is a kick: everyone simultaneously tries to say open as much as possible while avoiding the words Apple and iPhone altogether).  Didn’t Apple learn from the whole Windows – Mac OS experience that encouraging developers to write for your platform is key?