My take on it would be it's definitely OK to revive if it's going to be FOSS. Just like how VC replaced TC, even though the developers didn't intend for that to happen.
Online learning isn't a very big threat to colleges because colleges hold a sort of "social monopoly" on credentialling for majority of fields. No one will care about you coursera certificates they want a bachelors degree.
I'd say that they are more than moderate failures. I've heard from many acquaintances who aren't as tech literate as myself that one of the major reasons they got rid of their iPhone was not being able to install applications from outside sources.
Myself, I would never want to trust anything centralized.
It enables competition, which keeps everyone honest. If Amazon had an app store which was known to be full of malware then people would stop trusting them, but when there is real competition they need that trust to make money, so they would put in more effort to prevent that. If you find that your platform's app store is full of malware today when there is no competition, what is your alternative? Throw away your phone? Never install any apps?
The exposure is also not any worse when the people you trust are equally trustworthy. If you install ten apps from one distributor or ten apps from ten distributors and all of the distributors are equally trustworthy, the chance of an app you installed being approved even though it was malware is the same. It may even be lower because the distributors have to worry more about their reputations when there is competition.
And it also applies the other way. Right now they can reject apps that you want not because the apps are malicious but because they compete with the distributor's own. If there were five other trustworthy distributors then you could install it from any of them. So you could always get e-readers that compete with Amazon from Google, search apps that compete with Google from Microsoft, web browsers that compete with Apple from Mozilla and so on, no matter what kind of device you have.
> acquaintances who aren't as tech literate as myself that one of the major reasons they got rid of their iPhone was not being able to install applications from outside sources
Which applications did they want to install from outside sources? Which sources?
Where does something advertise itself as an iPhone app but not available on the App Store?
MBP quality has been consistently less and less quality as the years go on. It would take me a page just to write out the critical issues my brand new MBP is facing. Apple has not done much QC with the updates to the point of an update temporarily wasting the computer.
They have had very deceptive advertising tricks in the past, such as "original formula" not being the original at all, and having to fix it to "original taste." To me that is very underhanded.
This is from a moral, not a legal perspective.