Analyzing Apple's iPhone Strategy 270
Galen Gruman submitted infoworld's summary of Apple's grand strategy for the iPhone. He points out that the real important part of the new iPhone is the software, not the hardware. He talks about the new SDK stuff, the ad-hoc app distribution, and other stuff. It's a reasonable read if you have been ignoring the iPhone and want to know what the hype is about over this release, but doesn't break any new ground if you've been paying attention.
Objective C (Score:5, Insightful)
Slow news day? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, in that case, why is it on the front page?
Surely if a
Strategy? (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Make glitzy 'must have' consumer gadget.
2. Lock everyone into your distribution network.
3. Profit.
Business as usual.
Come on Taco, this is neither interesting nor news (Score:2, Insightful)
Although it is "stuff", I guess. Apple has ALWAYS been about the software - there has only been one point at which buying their hardware was advisable on any level, in the age of the G4. The PC quickly whipped their ass and the Mac became a PC (in the x86 sense.) Irony.
However, Apple has always been pretty bad at the hardware, with the exception of the intel-based macbooks. It looked sexy, but had serious flaws. For example, macs didn't have accelerated graphics (not even ANY 2d accel) until late in the Mac II era. But we're talking about a machine designed to be used only graphically. This seems like a major oversight - and it is. If the Amiga had been competently marketed instead of the company being sucked dry, today it would be "Apple who?"
Apple has ALSO always tried to make you do things their way, and if you don't like it, you can fuck off. These days you can see that in the form of their latest bid to prevent people buying iPhones without a contract. You could also see it in the iPhone with the fact that originally there was to be NO user-developed software beyond webapps, and even today you have to run a special OS release that Apple can (and HAS) terminate at will, or accidentally.
Meta-summary: apple is still a software company. (Score:5, Insightful)
Focussing on their hardware, whether it's the iMac or iPhone, is definitely missing the point. This guy definitely gets it.
One thing that I would like to see more of is details of the ad-hoc licensing. My google-fu is failing me there.
Apple's grand strategy? Lock-in. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Slow news day? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Objective C (Score:5, Insightful)
So many programmers feel it is better to stick with what they are asking for in the ads.
Thoughts on MobileMe (Score:1, Insightful)
But after using Google Apps for my personal email for well over a year now, filing individual messages into folders just seems quaint. GMail allows me to apply labels to entire threads at once.
Furthermore, although it doesn't exist in GMail yet, there is the potential for Google Gears to allow browser-based offline access. In my opinion, this is the direction email, contact management, and calendaring should be moving toward.
PS. I do understand all the arguments against having Google control you're email; I'm just saying I like that direction.
Re:Apple's grand strategy? Lock-in. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't have the skills to be developer and maybe I'm don't know something you know but here is what I see: If I can develop an application for the iPhone, I can be an independent developer without having to go through anyone but Apple. Millions of users can buy my app easily. I don't have to worry about maintaining an infrastructure for a yearly $99 license. If I charge $10, I get to keep $7. If 14 people in the world buy it, I've broken even. If 10,000 people buy my app, I've made $70,000. That is why I think a lot of people are interested: the potential of it.
Re:Objective C (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? The only developers I can think of that it would be a problem for are those guys who learned Java or VB at their trade school and have never learned anything else. Pretty much everyone else has picked up C at some point and Objective C is just a superset.
I'd also note that from what I've read developers are raving about the ease of use of the iPhone dev kit. From the development forums I see a lot of happy people, with the occasional clueless person asking if they can develop for the iPhone using Visual Basic 6. I've seen some complaints about the slow rate at which people are letting developers into the program, but not about objective C.
Re:Objective C (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Objective C (Score:4, Insightful)
Define "issue".
Is the choice of Objective-C a part of the reason why I'm not planning on doing iPhone development any time soon? Yes. Because it's a dead end.
While you can use Objective-C to build Mac applications, you don't need to — there are other languages that run on the Mac that are also commonly available on other platforms. And, outside of OS X and iPhone, there are no platforms I can think of where Objective-C is the "right answer", or even a "likely candidate". It's more like "you're using...what?" or "didn't that language die out a decade ago?"
Now, I'm not above learning a language solely to use a platform — I'm learning Python to play with Google AppEngine, for example. But Python has greater potential utility to me beyond AppEngine, more so than Objective-C does beyond iPhone, and so Python is less of an issue.
If the issue were solely language — say, for example, iPhone was likely to be as open as Android is likely to be — I'd probably overcome it. But, combine the language issue with the other issues, and iPhone just isn't compelling at present. Maybe that will change.
Re:Strategy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Strategy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Apple's grand strategy? Lock-in. (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you're a PC developer, then you can be independent without having to go through anyone full stop. It's a crying shame, and a testament to the egregious and undue influence the telecom industry has over our government, that the cell phone market isn't like that too. This kind of shit -- that is, requiring apps to have the "blessing" of the device manufacturer or service provider to work -- ought to be illegal!
Re:Apple's grand strategy? Lock-in. (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot to include the value of your time to develop the application, any time it might take to market it (e.g., even if it's just posting to Slashdot), any support costs, taxes, etc. Also, if 10K people might buy your app for their iPhone, there might be 100K people who might buy it if had a wider cell phone base, or 1000K people who might buy it if it was available for PCs, etc., so you might be chasing a tiny "profit pool" anyway if you only target the iPhone.
Microsoft has a similar model going with MSDN and lesser licenses and so do thousands of other vendors with a proprietary platform and a paid SDK/API/dev environment.
The $99 is there basically to protect Apple from the total time-wasters; Apple would otherwise give this away free so they can get developers, developers, developers.
Re:Still no open source apps (Score:5, Insightful)
From a geek's standpoint, you don't want a smartphone without open source options. For an average consumer, do they really care? They just want things to work. When the iPod came out there was a lot of griping about technically inferior the iPod was, and that it would never flourish. Hundreds of millions of iPods later, I would say that it's been a success. Really, my grandma didn't/doesn't care that the iPod can't play ogg-vorbis. All she knows is that when she puts her new CD into her computer in iTunes and then plugs in her iPod, she gets her music. If she got an iPhone she'd only care about getting on eBay to see if she won that cute figurine. She doesn't need to see the source code.
Re:Objective C (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Objective C (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Meta-summary: apple is still a software company (Score:3, Insightful)
It's also important to notice that those hardware specifics are generally tied to hardware requirements to make the user-interface work. That is to say, it ties really directly and clearly back into the software. At the same time that Apple is designing new hardware features to interface with their software, they've been generally moving towards more commodity hardware for the guts of their stuff. While the iMac has a history of the outside looking rather unusual compared to most computers, the components inside the shell are usually pretty standard stuff that'd be just as at home in a PC as in a Mac. The recent-ish switch to Intel being one of the most obvious examples.
It's a pretty reasonable strategy for product design, especially considering the consumer market.
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Objective C (Score:3, Insightful)
Programming languages are ultimately just expressions of logic, with different strengths for different applications. I once read that children who learn more than one language when they are young have a fundamentally different structure for the language center of their brains than those of us who learn only one, and a significantly greater facility for learning languages, because they essentially have a better data structure for storing and processing language. I think the same thing can be achieved with programming languages, one simply has to go out of one's way to *learn more than one*. I try to learn a new language every year or two, simply because it's good exercise for the brain.
Apple's strategy... unchanged (Score:5, Insightful)
1. make money.
2. make money.
3. make money, so that we can
4. make even more money.
I think they are doing great. Just for kicks (and to kick myself), I looked at how much I could have made if I had just invested $1000 in Apple in 1985. Taking the stock splits into account, that stock would be worth more than $500,000.
Apple is a great example of how you can take a fanatical fan base, show them nothing but contempt, charge outrageous amounts of money for everything connected with your products... and be adored all the more for it. THAT'S the kind of stock worth investing in, but it's a shame that setup is so difficult to replicate.
And... best of all, they are eating Linux's lunch. If someone hates Microsoft SO much, they aren't going to get Linux. They are going to buy a Mac, of course, and get locked in to that money sink (at least $150 in El Jobso's pocket every time they make a point release is great for Apple's bottom line!).
While Linux likewise has the fanatical user base... they just have no way of monetizing it. Linux users like being locked into that platform, but not enough to actually pay for anything. They are happy to use hardware two generations out of date, happy with being completely locked into FOSS (since extremely few companies will write for Linux), etc, but not happy enough to actually spend any money supporting what they supposedly believe in. Look at Red Hat- they've been doing poorly for years now, and that's not going to change (although their dropping the failed "Linux on the Desktop" project will undoubtedly help them a great deal).
While Apple has been gaining market share (up to 4-5%)... Linux's has remained flat for the past ten years (always around 0.65%, even as the size of the market has virtually exploded). Meaning... every Apple sold is coming from Linux's share of the market (either actual or potential). Which is good, since Linux has no chance of succeeding in competition with Microsoft, while Apple can do quite well with a tiny market share.
Re:Objective C (Score:1, Insightful)
Sorry for the harshness, but it is well deserved when you see this type of FUD propagated by pretending "BSD guys"
Re:Open Enough? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Apple's grand strategy? Lock-in. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Strategy? (Score:5, Insightful)
The iPhone is my 6th cell phone and the first that is an honest pleasure to use and powerful enough to accomplish more than playing 10 second ring tones. The iPhone literally represents the FIRST TIME I have been able to have a good phone, my iPod, email, calendar, contacts, maps, camera, web, etc in a single device that seamlessly syncs to my Mac computer. Period.
If you don't want to buy one, fine, but for me, having an iPhone is about having aall that stuff, and more, in a single device that elegantly works. The fact that it might look nice or 'cool' is merely icing.
Usability and functionally are not 'playing with a cool toy.' Getting things/work done in an intuitive way on your phone is still getting things/work done. Whether or not it was 'cool' or even fun to do it shouldn't take away from the fact that it was accomplished.
I am at a loss to understand why it is so hard for people to understand that futzing with poor UI is not fun for 99% of the people who use computers. The average user hates 'tinkering with their' tools (har!). They just want to USE them to Get Stuff Done. For you, perhaps menu-*-9-5-1-4-2 might be a fast way to access your pictures on your phone but for most people, myself included, it sucks way more than swipe-tap-tap-swipe.
Re:Apple's Strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. There are dozens of phones out that look very similar to the iPhone, by intention. Nah, Apple's strategy with the iPhone is the same one they used with the iPod. Enter a market with a product that is not cheaper or more featureful than the competition, but usability test the heck out of it, including the surrounding services and software. Provide only the features that work really, really well and easily. For the most part, people buy and use iPhones because a lot of the features present on other smartphones are just too hard to use for the average person. They're fine for geeks, but just not there for normal people. This explains why iPhone users actually use the features of their phones more often than users of competing phones. Is the iPhone the only one that can look up your location on a map and then find the closest sushi place and it's phone number? Nope. If it was my father using it, though, I'd sure rather he had an iPhone so he could do it in less than ten minutes and didn't have to ask me questions.
Basically, it is the same reason the Wii is selling so well, they expanded an existing market by making it more suited to the masses.
Re:it's the apps, stupid! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Apple's grand strategy? Lock-in. (Score:5, Insightful)
See, here's the thing: there's a huge fucking difference between having this service be available, and having it be mandatory. Having it available is good; I agree that it would be very convenient for small proprietary developers. Having it mandatory is bad, because it locks out Free Software and hobbyists.
Re:Apple's strategy... unchanged (Score:3, Insightful)
I know this is Slashdot, where anecdote and off-the-cuff remarks stand in for real argument, but I wonder if you could explain the contempt bit. My experience with Apple products has been that they last me for years and years. My 2G iPod is still going strong on its original battery, and my G5 is three years old and looking like it's got another three years left in it. Fas as I'm concerned, that's great value for the money.
Re:More disk space! (Score:2, Insightful)
The interface on the iPhone is really delicious, more so than I've *ever* seen on anything open-source. It's all well and good to be able to tweak things, but on a small gadget, a well-thought-out interface can make the difference between another piece of uselessness and something that's helpful in your everyday life.
No, I'm not happy about the closedness either, and I'm starting to get worried about how Apple uses proprietary things all over, but for a "secondary" computer, it's a price I'm willing to pay.
-Lars
Re:it's the apps, stupid! (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously? I mean, have you used a Windows Mobile device? I have one I use every day, and I have had to reboot it about as often as Windows 95. One of the (many) reasons I will be picking up an iPhone this July.
Re:Parallels (Score:2, Insightful)