I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Posted by rod@drury.net.nz in Apple, Communications, SaaS, TechBiz, Technolust at 5:52 am on Wednesday, 10 January 2007
Continuing my gush over the iPhone, here are some initial thoughts on why Apple has won:
- Elimination of the the hardware keyboard and buttons makes it just about Software. It’s an iPod with a radio. Therefore manufacturing is much cheaper than anyone else and the need to revise hardware is much less. Yet they can innovate more and distribute upgrades for free.
- The Microsoft Mobile team must be performing hari-kiri. They have had 5+ years and did not make it about the software. They wasted Microsoft’s key advantage. They could have easily done a soft keyboard but did not innovate. The mobile software was just a scaled down PC interface that doesn’t really work. Compare Pocket Outlook to the Blackberry Message Stream interface. Microsoft squandered the opportunity to make it about Software. Heads will roll. BillG must be pissed.
- The iPhone is based on OSX. This means that they already have a huge code base, dev resources and community in place. They also get value from moving data between Mac and iPhone versions. Safari is a good example but also Contacts, Mail etc should be easy to blur to the phone. Therefore there is a ready made infrastructure. The iPhone extends the Mac. Further the iPhone makes the full Apple Story more compelling. The iPhone will drive Apple Market share across all categories.
- OSX as a multitasking Interface should suit mobile networks as it allows background downloading.
- They have eliminated a device. The iPhone really is an iPod + Phone. With the iTunes infrastructure there are many opportunities for monetizing over the air downloads. This will guarantee carrier support.
- The iPhone is a compelling wireless Internet device. The inclusion of Safari is compelling.
- Google therefore has a huge vested interest. This is the first reveal of why Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on Apples Board. If this does become the compelling Wireless Internet Device, hits to Google services will jump significantly. Not just search, but maps, directories. This makes Google very local. Expect to see an installed GMail client. With GMail hosted domains does this become a compelling SME email solution?
- It’s Interaction Designed. Look at the SMS conversations as a simple example. The BB got a little way there but the iPhone SMS interface is just obviously right.
- iTunes becomes a multi-function portal blurring user data sync with media downloads. This model is more powerful than separate sync interfaces.
- Widgets provide a low cost/barrier way to get content onto the device, generating thousands of use cases for individuals.
- It’s thin, sexy and Apple cool
There are lots of things to think about in a New Zealand context:
- There is no announcement of a CDMA version. Is Telecom out in the cold?
- What does Apple+Google+Yahoo(+Telecom) mean now that Yahoo and iPhone are close but Telecom can’t use the iPhone.
- As a GSM product it should work here, but some features may require carrier support. For example, the Voice Message feature which allows you to go straight to a message and has message metadata including CallerID looks to need carrier side support.
- As Apple doesn’t have a presence here, who does the bizdev work with the carriers?
Opportunities:
- Suddenly being a Cocoa developer makes you look very smart.
- The widget model allows easy access to web service applications. Very easy way to get application fragments onto the device. This is cool for SaaS apps.
- Most web companies don’t target Safari as a Browser (because while it is fast - it’s standards support sucks). You would have to think that that should improve with the Leopard update of Safari. So from Leopard Safari needs to be in your Browser support plans. Again huge for SaaS.
- If Safari becomes a mainstream browser, will .Net developers request MacPro’s and develop on Parallel’s?
- Enterprise Mac and iPhone. If these devices win the hearts of consumers (and as consumers often work in corporates), there will be a huge demand for Enterprise features as mentioned earlier.
At close of trading my APPL shares are up $US1300 (in 2 hours!!). That’s a couple of iPhones paid for. Nice! Should be a big day for APPL tomorrow once the news is digested. Might be able to buy dual 30″s Craig!
blog
Good analysis Rod!
The one nit I might pick is regarding the lack of a physical keyboard. It sounds OK, but let’s look at a couple of historical examples:
1) Palm has had a virtual keyboard for a long time. Granted, it was meant to be operated by a stylus, but guess what? The Treo still won with a physical keyboard.
2) Remember the virtual/laser keyboard that projected the keys on a flat surface? It also failed miserably.
One reason posited for the dominance of the physical keyboard is the presence of physical feedback when keys are pressed. You don’t get that with a virtual keyboard. I think this might be “overcome-able” but it will be an obstacle for a lot of people. Touch is important. The sound of a key-click is a poor feedback substitute.
Fortunately, Apple’s interaction designers are usually spot on, so I’ll reserve judgment until I actually get one of these in my hands.
We miss you at Quest, but I still enjoy your blog!
Thanks Eric, I miss your weekly emails. I’m sure you were a romance novelist in a past life. No one makes Search Marketing strategy read as well as you do.
Yes, the iPhone is sexy little device indeed. My only gripe with no keyboard is that I’ll be spending as much time cleaning that beautiful screen as I’ll be using it! I don’t want grubby paw-prints on my iPhone ;)
Hi Rod, Happy New Year.
There is one major difference between Microsoft and Apple - Apple makes the hardware and the software whereas Microsoft is just a software company (keyboards, mice, Zune, xBox etc don’t really count).
The iPhone is a consumer item just like the iPod is, and unlike the iPod that does not need Apple to integrate with third parties, the iPhone (name owned by Cisco which is interesting)needs mobile phone networks as you mention. And this is where there could be “trouble at mill” as they say. Personally I do not want to browse web sites such as the New York Times on a screen that size, or to be honest twice that size. And this is the problem that many of these devices suffer from. Visually while they look cute, they have a difficulty factor to them and you are just about at that age when this will all kick in (eyesight starts to deteriorate).
By the way I have been running Vista in various versions from Beta to live now since early September and I am absolutely rapt in it. But what in many ways is even more impressive is Office 2007. This is a big upgrade as far as ease of use and functionality goes.
Cococa, pfftt.
I had read some speculation about the iPhone yesterday that said it would run on Webkit which is already on some Nokia phones. At a glance it should be as easy to create a widget for the dashboard as it is for the iPhone.
Most web companies don’t target Safari as a Browser and Safari’s standards support sucks? What web companies and standards are you hanging out with? Most responsible web designers/developers support Safari and Safari compatibility is pretty easy to achieve using web standards (Javascript can slow it down I give you that).
I second both your enthusiasm and analysis of the phone, and Dermott’s comments about the grubby screen.
The other comment I have is that the I think the deal with Cingular was a necessary evil for Steve Jobs; I think he’d far rather be able to release products that don’t rely on anyone else, but the alternative to building a phone without the support of a network (who is prepared to provide a network that will allow the special features of the iPhone to work) is that:
* the phone would just have the same kinds of features that every other phone already had (and/or would not be able to boast new features)
* he wouldn’t get to mass market fast enough; currently it’s the Cingulars of the world who sell phones in order to get people to use their network, not the other way around
I see the following scenario playing out:
* the deal with Cingular will not be renewed in two years
* within two years, every GSM network will be capable of fully supporting the iPhone
* as such, you will be able to use the iPhone with any network
* BUT, you may not actually need a phone network at all; VOIP / wifi will end up trumping the need for celluar networks, and Steve will have positioned the iPhone as the perfect device for taking advantage of this
The Cingular deal was just a way to get maximum bang in a short amount of time . . to temporarily offer something no one besides Cingular can offer as a smokescreen for getting enough penetration to not rely on mobile phone companies in the future at all.
Dan, well my company does not target Safari because we don’t specifically target Macs. And most of the customers we do development work for don’t worry about Mac Internet users; maybe they should and maybe we should however that’s just the way it is.
In November 2006 of computers using the Internet, 3.5% were using Mac’s, 3.3% were using Linux, 1.0% Windows 98, 0.4% on NT, 8.00% on Windows 2000 and 74.9% on Windows XP. So let me see, where is the sweet spot for developers here? You cannot meet everyone’s needs all the time as a developer without compromising somewhere - time to market, cost to develop, business costs etc.
And by the way the Mac’s Internet presence was 3.6% in October and 3.8% in September, so the trend is down hill to flat.
If Apple was serious the main thrust of their conference would not be a phone but something more substantial.
While a point by point discussion seems a little excessive, I have *got* to reply to this somehow…
For a start I think those imagining being able to run Cocoa code on this thing are being a bit optimistic. Cocoa applications can be very RAM hungry and can rely on a lot of external frameworks which Apple may not be willing to ship on the iPhone. Besides, Cocoa would limit Apple to either the PPC or i386 instruction sets and whatever the iPhone is running I’m happy to bet it’s not either of those - probably ARM. Hey, if you can build OS X for PPC and i386 why not ARM as well?
Dashboard widgets, on the other hand, are a clear win. Small, interpreted, pretty and there’s hundreds of them. Some are even useful. I had been wondering why Apple had put so much effort into Dashcode (http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/dashcode.htm) I guess we now know why.
I wouldn’t be so fast to dismiss the Microsoft mobile team either. MS’s business plan until very recently has always been “we write the OS to go on other people’s hardware”. The iPhone has taken some very serious advances in hardware to become possible. But, credit where it’s due, some very serious lateral thinking took place in the software teams too - along with the constant fear of a man who will kill everyone in the room if it’s not absolutely beautiful to look at, hold and use.
I think the big standout for me is to look at the iPhone in the light of people increasingly building their ‘digital lives’ around online services rather than pieces of software as such. Can someone with an iPhone put 95% of their computing requirements in their pocket and carry it around? Did the thin client need to be physically thin before it took off? We may be about to find out…
Dave
Can’t see them supporting CDMA very soon - it’s mostly on the way out (and of course a CDMA phone is very limited as to where it can roam). Telecom really should be planning how they’ll replace that particular white elephant.
In terms of adding WiFi support, an issue is that all mobile phones are only affordable because the operators subsidise them. I can’t see Vodafone wanting to pay a subsidy for a phone that can bypass their network. Even things like IM or more efficient voice messaging are a problem - currently making people spend airtime minutes listening to message service prompts is part of the operator’s business model.
Is the trend really towards smarter mobiles, or will the mobile phone become a semi-disposable $50 item? It’s possible that rather than having a phone-centric world, GSM/3G (& Wifi) will become a feature that gets added to devices that benefit from communication (music players, cars, personal EFTPOS, cameras, etc)
this is interesting http://www.kottke.org/07/01/the-apple-iphone
its going to be reasonablly big, for a phone.
What an amazingly insightful summary/synopsis! Thanks, I am already quoting you! Interesting comments you have already about the absence of a keyboard, etc.
I think that what we have to appreciate is that Apple succeeds because it knows how the consumer ticks. The fact that most people I know have at least 2 iPods (I have 3) has nothing to do with need or practicality. It’s “want”. My overwhelming desire to buy a MacBook has no rationale, other than having a black MacBook (with a lower spec than my iMac) would be cool. It will be exactly the same with the iPhone. I love my Treo 750 but I really want an iPhone.
Hats off to Apple on the iPhone. I can’t wait to get one. It’s probably worth a trip to the States in June!
I don’t see how iPhone will drive Mac sales. iPod didn’t do it, so why iPhone will? I come across the opposite when Mac users go and buy a PC with Windows instead of upgrading their aging Mac to run Windows on it. My customers need to run certain Windows applications to use my service. Very few opted to run Windows on Mac. Most of them bought PCs for this purpose and don’t seem to be complaining.
The other thing is switching providers. Look at younger people - they have 2, sometimes 3 phones at the same time to use the specials from different providers. They need to be cheap and disposable as they get lost, stolen, smashed, drowned, you name it. One doesn’t take an iPod to town on a Fri night, but a mobile is a must.
What about the battery life?
Cheers,
Max
Somebody commented that there is one major difference between Apple and Microsoft, but in my opinion they identified the wrong one thing (hardware+software vs. software) - it’s about wanting to change the world vs. maximising profit from the world. iPod isn’t JUST about making money - it’s about changing how people listen to music. iPhone is about changing how people use existing and future technologies.
And with that change comes a raft of (SaaS, etc.) opportunities - we won’t just be interacting with disconnected objects, we will be part of the network.
I wonder if they are going to solder the battery in to ensure they get the same in-built obsolescence as the iPods. They said the battery will last 5 hours, which means 1.8 by week 3. I can’t wait to see all those gym bunnies jogging around Oriental Bay with that sucker strapped to their biceps. Do Mac people jog or are they Windows people (those people look like they have jobs) ?
Nobody will be designing web pages for these devices specifically. Apple will just need to build to web standards. Safari had 1.6% share of browsers on Trade Me in December.
And VOIP over WiFi is some way off. They need to get 3G capable units. Cingular has just 30% market share in the U.S. - about 50m subscribers. To reach 10m units they need 1 in 5 Cingular subscribers to buy one. That’s 20% market share, not 1% Steve.
It is beautiful though.
I think you’ll find Safari’s standards support is pretty good .. they just arent working to the same “standards” Microsoft work to .. as a web developer its a LOT easier to work to support Safari/Firefox and add backwards support for IE than vice versa.
In todays Internet anyone saying “we dont target macs as they are a minority” is lazy - its nowhere near as hard as it used to be. We may be a minority at 3.x% but I bet if you look at Mac users round the world they are a lot more influential in the tech sector than the top 10-15% of PC users. ..
Rod, re: “Most web companies don’t target Safari as a Browser (because while it is fast - it’s standards support sucks”).
Safari passes the Acid 2 test…http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/acid/
No version of IE does.
Great comments on the iPhone (But I don’t think it is an iPod replacement).
I have been thinking more about the iPhone and would make these two points.
The Nokia N95 is a much better phone. Has it all and will be available very soon
and will work in NZ which the iPhone won’t any day now (or even year now).
The iPhone is not tactile and you need this to use a phone unless you are sitting in a cafe. In a car answering the phone it needs to be tactile.
“The iPhone is not tactile and you need this to use a phone unless you are sitting in a cafe. In a car answering the phone it needs to be tactile.”
Not quite sure what you mean here. One of the nicer iPhone features is a proximity sensor that switches the handset to phone mode when you bring it up to your face.
Widget compatibility is another strength. Dashboard’s basically an annoyance in the Mac environment, but the widgets look quite compelling in the context of the iPhone.
The voicemail feature is a classic Apple why-didn’t-anyone-else think of it idea.
And Rod, you’re spot-on with the Google link. I suspect this is just the first item in the strategy cemented in when Schmidt joined the Apple board.
But, really, this is an amazing demonstration of the Apple mojo. The iPhone is front-page of the herald today, in a story written by a journalist flown to CES by Microsoft. Ouch. And all this for a device which:
- Isn’t 3G
- Doesn’t have FCC approval
- Is at least a year away from a NZ launch.
I assume Vodafone will have to do some thinking before then. Vodafone’s music download service is actually doing very well (while Telecom has dropped the ball, again). Supporting this phone will mean making friends with iTunes.
Nobody will be designing web pages for these devices specifically. Apple will just need to build to web standards. Safari had 1.6% share of browsers on Trade Me in December.
Interesting. It’s consistently ~8% on Public Address, with another 4% using Firefox on MacOS.
Share Price up 4% today. That’s the first 30 incher. Go AAPL.
Personally Apple coolness means nothing to me - it’s just ultra-consumerism and pure marketing ploys to hype the market and push stock up. Today there are far better alternatives to all of the ipod range in both features and ability and which cost less – just spend two minutes on Trademe! I think Apple is in a huge mine field here and has a lot to get right. I predict this will either be limited in success due to very poor cellphone characteristics or fail very badly. Some more interesting commentary here:
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/desktop_mobile/wheres_the_you_in_iphone.html
The announcement on the iPhone may well be great for you guys with equity in Apple, but otherwise I’m extremely cynical.
As Sam says, the lack of 3G, even if it was first generation UMTS, is disappointing. It tethers the iPhone to either a physical connection with a computer or Wifi if you want to fill up those 4 or 8 gigs with music and video.
It’s possible that Apple will come out with a HSPA (HSDPA/HSUPA) model later but I’m still stunned that it released a GPRS/EDGE iPhone in 2007.
The tactile feedback issue is more important than people think. Microsoft’s take on innovation here was to use a stylus and (very good) hand writing recognition for Windows Mobile devices. I’ve got an i-mate Jam phone here without a keyboard - only a clicker button and a touch-sensitive screen that’s best operated with a stylus.
While I admire the technology that drives it, the concept just isn’t practical. If you can’t operate a phone with one hand, it’s borderline useless. Furthermore, dragging a stylus across an almost frictionless screen with electronic ink feels unnatural and it’s much harder to be accurate than with pen and paper. This, incidentally, is why tablet PCs didn’t take off and most likely won’t.
It’ll be interesting to see how the iPhone overcomes the lack of “tactility” and greasy fingers. Not that I think people will use it as a phone anyway. You’d look like a right berk with a huge, flat iPhone pressed to the side of your head…
The cleverest thing about the iPhone is the high pricing. None of your loss-leader rubbish for Apple!
Russell, by tactile I mean a sense of touch, and while the iPod has a button or wheel if you like, the tactileness of it is very low whereas a standard cellphone which has a physical button has a higher sense of tactileness to it. And the iPhone has less of a tactile sense than the iPod. It’s a usability issue, and while Apple is very good at presenting products designed by Jonathan Ive or FrogDesign or F.A. Porsche, usability is where the rubber meets the road. And while Apple is good at making cool looking products they are not always the best in the usability stakes.
Joe Wilcox on eWeek made the following observations - http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/desktop_mobile/wheres_the_you_in_iphone.html
Sam asked was the battery soldered in; well it is fixed in and non replaceable by the user.
The iPhone supports the Cingular EDGE network not 3G which makes it less desirable and unworkable in lots of locations.
It’s expensive compared to other phones.
I migrated from a Palm T2 to a treo. T2 has soft keyboard and handwriting recognition (aka “graffiti”). I loved using graffiti, and now that I have migrated to the treo, rarely use the keyboard. I prefer to use a version of graffiti.
Appreciate the “tactility” issue, but think it is a furphy. Most ppl 95% of time only dial a few known numbers, and with speed dial (on eg treo) that’s about 2-3 symbols. Does the sensitivity to proximity of face means tactility not necessary to answer phone?
On other hand, look at the advantages. Graffiti takes learning, but it is better than a tiny keyboard, especially for the PDA function.
It looks great, its really cool.
But…
It needs 3G, Wireless Syncing, more Storage and a much cheaper price.
I’ll wait till version 2 and then compare it to what MS have at that time.
I can’t afford a huge premium over wm5 just for a nice interface.
The people who this phone will benefit are the non-techy people who won’t be able to justify the price.
The rest of my thoughts are here:
http://peteremcc.wordpress.com/2007/01/10/iphone-review/
“The people who this phone will benefit are the non-techy people who won’t be able to justify the price.”
And those same non-techy people will also, in most countries not even know this thing is out, being as how it will be dwarfed by the marketing spend of Nokia, Motorola and the like, and the models that these companies will roll out and market against this.
Hell, despite what you read online, in most of the world, outside the US, the iPod does not even dominante MP3 players.
Its pretty, but its a niche product.
Juha: “It’s possible that Apple will come out with a HSPA (HSDPA/HSUPA) model later but I’m still stunned that it released a GPRS/EDGE iPhone in 2007.”
The phone is not actually released yet, I’d be surprised if Apple didnt bump the specs for the European/Asian(International) markets .. by the looks of Cingulars coverage 3G is not all that available in the US (Or Im reading it wrong) http://www.cingular.com/coverageviewer/
It occurs to me that the iPhone could be a big hit in North America and a relative flop everywhere else - a bit like the Blackberry.
The mobile phone market is very geographically diverse. Americans took years to accept mobiles and still don’t really get text messaging. Europeans want small and sexy and object to anything with a full keyboard (apparently). Japan had a huge success with iMode when the rest of the world struggled with WAP. There is no proper 3G in the US, but there will probably be WiMax and muni networks.
Of course one reason Safari users seem under represented on the trademe site is for a while the site refused to allow Mac users to upload photos. I posted a “fix” to the User Agent string for Mac browsers that avoided the check to the community boards. At least one user (my wife) is still using it to this day.
C
Cingular is rolling out HSDPA on their own network. I would imagine they’ll be as keen for Apple to update the data technology as anyone.
Interested to see some 3rd party apps running on the phone. Also wondering if they’ve implemented a standard file transfer protocol over wifi or if iTunes is required.
The battery life is 5 hours of *talk* time. They don’t say what the standby time is. By comparison the Nokia N91 has 3-4 hours of talk time and 190 hours of standby time. So the iPhone should be fine.
I’m contemplating buying one in the US in June and bringing it back to NZ. Do you think it would work with the Vodafone network? Obviously the visual voice mail won’t work without network support but the normal phone functions should. Right?
Cisco sueing Apple over iPhone name
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4266&tag=nl.e589
Ummm… All this is based on a demo by someone known for his slick presentation skills. Where are the independant reviews?
I did love the comment by Jason at 37Signals though: “When you touch it it doesn’t touch you back”
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/188-iphone-not-touchy-feely
cheers
shane
‘* BUT, you may not actually need a phone network at all; VOIP / wifi will end up trumping the need for celluar networks, and Steve will have positioned the iPhone as the perfect device for taking advantage of this ‘
Pah! The total global WiFi hotspot coverage equates to an area roughly the size of the Isle of Wight, and whilst is growing, will never EVER come even marginally close to the reach of cellular. WiFi is never going to be more than a home/office solution that is free and ubiquitous. People do not go to Starbucks to make phone calls. As for the alternatives, the Emperor’s New Clothes that is WiMax is obsolete now, let alone in many years time when the standard is actually “agreed”. Devices will never reach the scale required to meet the price points required by 18-month and shrinking replacement cycles.
CDMA2000/EVDO, whilst being a smart technology and easy to deploy in 1.25MHz channels, is a dead man walking. This is reflected in every single deployment/upgrade technology choice metric the industry uses. HSxPA is the only way forward, with LTE / IMT Advanced the logical successor in a decade’s time. The simple truths are that a: Shannon’s law still holds true regarding Bit/Hz/Second, and b: You don’t get something for nothing. All modern wireless technologies are similar in throughput for a given scenario, Coverage costs, men in white vans are still needed to build/service the networks, and so customers need to pay to keep the lights on in the MNO’s. We are happy to pay for a service that is ubiquitos, reliable and secure. WiFi is none of these things and never will be.
On the iPhone, Tomi Ahonen nails it when he states it has to have SMS absolutely nailed down to win outside the US. SMS is more important than voice, email (push or pull), web browsing, music or anything else it can do. The absence of a keypad makes on-handset dictation all the more important to get right, and if they do then composing SMS in places you would be happy to talk is sorted. But in meetings or close, public spaces the keypad experience is vital. Among the demographic who will likely be able to afford to or justify paying for the iPhone (students, execs, Geeks) SMS is seen as more important than voice.
Apple’s announcements…
…
Regarding Safari’s share on Trade Me. I don’t know how many Safari users there are in New Zealand, but I suspect a lot are like me: choose to use a Mac at home but have to use Windows at work. Of course, I only look at Trade Me during my lunch break.
Zach,
iTunes if required, no wifi transfer.
Infact you can’t even sync iTunes over wifi!
Oh and no 3rd party applications are supported, at least yet.
Apple have made it clear that it doesn’t support user created widgets so only they can add features to it - “to ensure the best possible user experiance” etc.
Found this:
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/01/11/jobs-confirms-iphone-is-a-closed-platform/
Officially confirming what Dan reported earlier, Jobs told Newsweek (at the bottom) that the iPhone will indeed be a closed platform. He is quoted as saying: “You don’t want your phone to be an open platform…. You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”
He also said something similar to the New York Times: “These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”
———–
OUCH. No surprise tho, really.
[...] Thanks for all the comments on the iPhone post. Great discussion. [...]
Bit of admission of defeat for the software profession if that is the case.
- Blackberry isn’t a closed platform
- Windows Mobile isn’t a closed platform
- Even your cooking Nokia/Sony Ericcson/Alcatel aren’t closed - they provide J2ME (Java Mobile Environment)
If the proposed Apple mobile layers are architected such that a rogue application in a phone could take down Cingular’s network, then I’m a bit worried - what’s to stop hackers reverse engineering an iPhone and sending out the “packets of doom”.
I think this a commecial decision masquerading under the guise of “security”!
Sorry for commenting so late in the piece - it looks like I missed out a great discussion, but….. I see one flaw in the iPhone story.
There has been plenty of talk about how by having the phone run a full version of OSX and making it all about the software will open up the way for development of a suite of great applications and widgets. I’m not sure this will happen - at least not quickly anyway.
Apple have locked down their O/S tight - always have done, and won’t be allowing 3rd party developers to write applications for the iPhone. In fact, Steve Jobs even went as far to say so in a Newsweek interview “..You don’t want your phone to be an open platform…” which I take to mean that all applications will either be developed by Apple Inc, or strongly vetted by them.
Perhaps this is an opportunity for Microsoft - by letting their dev community (which is probably the strongest - and certainly the largest) continue to develop innovative apps for Windows Mobile devices, they may just come out on top.
Don’t get me wrong - I think the iPhone is a sexy device, want one now and even went as far to post on my blog about it http://webnz.blogspot.com/ (shameless plug).
URL of Newsweek interview with Steve Jobs - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16566968/site/newsweek/
Without wanting to impose on Rod’s thread:
It would be not too difficult to envisage an iPhone workalike shell for Windows Mobile - all the hooks are there to do it. If MS had any mongrel in them any more, they’d have it out in 3 months as a downloadable “iPhone killer”. failing that, HTC might do it, or some bedroom hacker.
Covered in the Herald … http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=27&objectid=10419620
[...] http://www.drury.net.nz/2007/01/10/why-apple-wins/ [...]
I’m of the belief Steve may roll back on not allowing custom applications to run on the iPhone - Perhaps not before the Cingular arrangement expires though, to keep them on board and reasonably happy for the duration.
But allowing a developer ecosystem to develop around iPhone just makes too much sense. This is different from the iPod, which is the very definition, pretty much, of a single function device. Phones are more diverse, multi-function. Apple’s strategy really should reflect that.
[...] yesterday’s euphoria (and it wasn’t just you, Rod), everyone’s had time to think about the iPhone and its [...]
I don’t know if Apple really got one up on Microsoft with the iPhone. The argument on it’s “just about software” is flawed because they closed the system. The OSX is good news to mac users, but it has no support for windws files like .doc and .xls. Unremovable battery, lack of hard drive space compared to the 80 gigs in current ipods, etc. I hate to say it, but I’m just not sold on the iPhone.
Check out my blog for a preview of the iPhone features