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From: RedGrittyBrick on 14 Apr 2010 05:13
On 14/04/2010 05:19, Peter Duniho wrote:
>
> Apple's true motivations are known only to them. Of course, there's no
> shortage of speculation.
>
> The official party line is that their policies "ensure a positive
> customer experience". But Apple has a long history, since Steve Jobs
> came back, of building their business models around lock-in. And that
> depends on them keeping an iron grip on how developers use their
> platforms, especially on the consumer-electronics side.
>
> It's my opinion that Apple's belief is that by restricting developers in
> this way, they will prevent people from developing cross-platform
> programs, and that Apple — having the market–share advantage at the
> moment — will remain the platform of choice. That is, developers without
> the resources to write the same program multiple times will have to
> choose a platform, and they will choose Apple.
>
> It's also my opinion that this strategy will blow up in their face. In
> reality, other manufacturers are catching up and will be eating away at
> their market share. I gather Android has already made significant
> inroads on that front. And being evil to their developers is only going
> to make developers more likely to focus on non-iPhone platforms, not less.
>

I'm reminded of Joel Spolsky's essay† saying that successful companies
commoditise the complements of their products. I guess Phone-app
developers should like Android for this reason. By this logic, Apple
ought to be welcoming Java, Flash and other app development tools.
Perhaps the iTunes app-store by itself is doing a pretty good job of
making apps for iPhones a commodity.

†http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
--
RGB
From: Peter Duniho on 14 Apr 2010 11:38
RedGrittyBrick wrote:
> I'm reminded of Joel Spolsky's essay† saying that successful companies
> commoditise the complements of their products. I guess Phone-app
> developers should like Android for this reason. By this logic, Apple
> ought to be welcoming Java, Flash and other app development tools.
> Perhaps the iTunes app-store by itself is doing a pretty good job of
> making apps for iPhones a commodity.

While Spolsky's assertion makes some sense to me, I'm not sure it's
completely proven. Also, I'm not sure of the ultimate conclusion even
if we take the assertion as given.

If the goal is to commoditize apps on the iPhone, that means it has to
be difficult or impossible for one developer to do something
significantly better than or different from any other developer. This
could well mean prohibiting the use of a variety of tools, so that each
developer is starting from the same place. In such an environment, you
never get any truly special apps, but you do get a large number of
similar apps.

On the other hand, given that part of Apple's approval process seems to
be to take into account whether there's a substantially similar app
already available, and to disapprove and app if there is. So, whether
commoditization is a good thing or not, and whether open or closed tools
are the best path to that, it doesn't seem like that's actually the goal
Apple is trying to achieve.

Pete
From: RedGrittyBrick on 14 Apr 2010 13:39
On 14/04/2010 16:38, Peter Duniho wrote:
> RedGrittyBrick wrote:
>> I'm reminded of Joel Spolsky's essay† saying that successful companies
>> commoditise the complements of their products.
>
> While Spolsky's assertion makes some sense to me, I'm not sure it's
> completely proven. Also, I'm not sure of the ultimate conclusion even if
> we take the assertion as given.
>
> If the goal is to commoditize apps on the iPhone, that means it has to
> be difficult or impossible for one developer to do something
> significantly better than or different from any other developer.

Well, I think you highlight the flaw in the analogy with true
commodities (wheat, gold, oil, pork?). Perhaps I oversimplified what
Spolsky was driving at.

Clearly it is in Apples interest to have a large number of inexpensive
applications for their iPhone hardware.


> On the other hand, given that part of Apple's approval process seems to
> be to take into account whether there's a substantially similar app
> already available, and to disapprove and app if there is.

To digress a little, Apple's approvals process is alleged to be somewhat
opaque and seemingly arbitrary. I was recently looking for an iPhone app
that would encrypt small notes organised by title, e.g. for passwords
and longer, but still small, chunks of text. I found a few apps in the
App store that did this and were rather similar to one another. None of
them had certain features I wanted (e.g. synchronising or just copying
the encrypted data to a PC over USB) If I wanted to write such an app
presumably it would be in danger of being rejected unless I heavily
emphasised the differentiating features? What if it were accepted but
the next version of one of the other apps then also included the new
features?

I suspect it isn't in Apple's interests to have lots of identical apps
in their app-store but neither is it in their interest to stifle
competition. By trying to adjudicate on similarity, Apple are certainly
setting themselves up for a lot of work - and to look foolish occasionally.


> So, whether
> commoditization is a good thing or not, and whether open or closed tools
> are the best path to that, it doesn't seem like that's actually the goal
> Apple is trying to achieve.

As you said before, we can only speculate about Apple's thinking.
However it is probably not in Apple's interest for 100,000 iPhone apps
to immediately appear in the Android marketplace and the Ovi store - as
they might if all were written in J2ME say.

So yes, the commoditisation idea may not stand up completely to detailed
scrutiny - but I found it afforded an interesting perspective of the
Java iPhone issue.

--
RGB
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