In the wake of this week's revelations about Path's great address book faux-pas, there have been a lot of calls for Apple to do a better job protecting the user's address book. Admittedly, one has to wonder why programmatic access to the address book isn't guarded the same way that Twitter accounts or the user's current location is. I'm going go out on a conspiratorial limb by saying that the absence of such a safe-guard belies a more prevalent attitude baked into the design of most Apple products and services.
If there's one thing Apple has really excelled at, it is the personal computing experience. While "PC" has come to mean a cheap Intel machine running some flavor of Windows, its original meaning was to distinguish itself from the mainframe and mini-computers that came before it. Before the personal computer, computers were tools of large organizations. The personal computer revolution was a democratization of computing power that now extended it to an individual. As the personal computing industry grew from a garage industry to a real business Apple was at the forefront of defining the personal computing experience.
Fast forward some thirty years later and you could easily argue that Apple's success derives from the fact that they get personal computing in a way no one else does. That focus on the individual is what creates such passionate fans of the technology. But I think there's a cost to this. Where Apple excels at serving the needs of the individual they routinely ignore or fall flat on any sort of collaborative work.
iWork.com has been around for two years and nobody knows what the hell to do with it. Pity the fool who thought they found a nicer-looking Google Docs alternative only to discover that their spreadsheet just went into the data-equivalent of a roach-motel. iCloud is strictly for the individual. My wife and I can't use the same photo-stream unless we both use the same iCloud account. So we have two separate photo libraries that we're always trying to sync. Only in the last few years did Apple start to address the common case of multiple iTunes music libraries in one house.
Take a look at the built-in Address Book (Mac OS) and Contacts (iOS) apps. Whether it's on iOS or Mac OS, it is an application that is, at best, tolerated by users. Setting aside the teeth-gnashing about skeuomorphic excesses, these apps are simply not that useful. They're just very slick interfaces to what is essentially a database. What's worse is that on Lion, it's actually more difficult to use than previous incarnations. It took me quite a while to figure out that clicking on the red bookmark was how to switch between group and individual mode. I don't think I'm alone.
A company that really understood how families, small groups and yes, even businesses, collaborate wouldn't make software like this. To be fair, I'm not sure anyone else has really nailed this either but attempts have been made. This is admittedly a tricky problem because effective collaboration is at the mercy of any group's particular dynamics. It's an explosion of use-cases. If you've ever been forced to use a tool like SharePoint, you know how catering to so many needs results in an unwieldy system.
In that light, it may just be that Apple has chosen not to drag down the individual experience by catering to the group experience at all. However, I think it's worth entertaining the notion that this individual-first thinking is baked into the very DNA of the company. Look at its founder. Steve Jobs was famously prickly and difficult to work with. In his world collaboration meant doing things his way. He is also, perhaps, the most famous example of the worst self-centered excesses of the Baby Boomer generation. That ego resulted in a lot of wonderful products, but also a lot of broken friendships.
No, I'm not surprised that there isn't (yet) an opt-in to the address book. I think it's pretty obvious that it has been low-tier feature to Apple. Maybe they just don't know how to address groups of people. But I don't think it's a stretch to say that "me-first" is what the company was built on. That attitude has given scant attention to group dynamics. But you know what? Most of the time the result has been pretty damn good.