I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
It’s fascinating watching Apples strategy role out. They are doing some very clever things.
- Providing full access to the iPhone stack makes developers feel good and like they are in control.
- But Apple is tightly in control of the distribution and gets to clip 30% of each application sale as well as control what is on the device. This is an incredible market control mechanism and I’m sure will lead to anti-trust activity. But for now they appear to have pulled it off.
- iTunes with songs was clearly a Trojan Horse and now iTunes is an IP based distribution mechanism for movies and now applications. Any content. Apple have a global billing system.
- As bandwidth issues get solved iTunes becomes a superset of BluRay. They let the irrelevant HiDef format battle play it self out.
- The iPhone SDK of course only runs on a Mac. Windows runs on a Mac. So developers who are doing .Net development and want an iPhone client will develop on MacBook Pro’s. We are already seeing some of our dev people buying their own MacBookPro’s and connecting them to their company supplied Windows dev machines.
- Going with Microsoft Active Sync launches the iPhone immediately into enterprise land. Middle managers are consumers as well.
- Arch competitor Microsoft have delivered a very solid Office product for the Mac that allows Macs to work reasonably well in the Enterprise environment.
- They are positioning RIM (Blackberry) as a closed proprietary system. (Now isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black). Note also the reference to all messages going through Canada - ‘out of our country’. That’s hardball.
- Apple have also marginalized the carriers and introduced a global device that works both on carrier and pure IP networks.
- While doing all this they have still maintained a ‘cool’ brand and significant consumer good will.
Apple seems to be very coordinated right now and executing. It is impressive to watch.
So an interesting thing to think about is if you were in charge of Microsoft strategy what would you do? I’m not sure here are a lot of easy things you can do. To fight hard you would need to make some tough calls. I’m not sure I would have licensed Active Sync (but I’m pleased they did). Do they kill Mac Office? (I hope they don’t).
If you were RIM what would you do?
(sorry about the triple captcha on comments, will try to get that fixed today)
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RIM should build a Blackberry application for the iPhone that interfaces with their servers.
Their server-side technology is still very useful and makes data charges negligible. If their IP isn’t this space wasn’t extremely valuable as part of the user experience then they never would have been successful over Windows Mobile devices right? So i’m not sure if they really need to sell their handsets to every customer any more. Let some customers buy an iPhone and spend $99 on a blackberry app that allows them to switch (where have I heard that before)easily.
Of course the SDK’s limit of one app running at a time might but the kibosh on the BB app being able to sync and get push content as it comes.
Ross: haven’t got that deep into the official SDK yet, but assuming how the phone works hasn’t suddenly changed (which I doubt) it isn’t absolutely essential of forced that an app quit totally when you hit the Home button. It’s just a good idea.
It’s true that if you have no good reason to stay running then you should conserve resources by checkpointing your state to disk, quitting, and resuming where you were next time you’re run. But you can also reduce resource use and keep running.
I’ve done it by accident! One day my iPhone woke up and popped up a dialog box warning that I was nearly out of disk space. Turned out a GUI program I’d been writing a few days earlier was still running in the background and had been quietly writing debug log messages to disk the whole time. Oops.
And it’s Unix. You can leave some tiny non-GUI daemon running.
Apple certainly seem to be happy for people to write always-on but resource-light apps for AIM/MSN/IRC etc.
I don’t understand Rod’s comment about anti-trust.
Apple sells some devices and has an online store where you can buy content (including programs) for them. How is that in any way either unusual or a monopoly? Verizon does *exactly* the same thing in the USA. There is no way for a non-developer to put a program on your Verizon phone except through the Verizon “Get it Now!” deck, and Verizon tests and approves every program that is available (in fact Qualcomm tests them before they even get to Verizon’s approval process).
Making a device and making it a closed world is in no way a monopoly. It does not erect any barrier to entry to a competitor. Apple having a phone and an online store does not make it any harder for someone else to do the same. It’s not easy of course, but then it never was. And it’s always hard for an unknown to get traction. But Sony or Microsoft or Nokia or Virgin or any number of others could do it if they wanted to.
Well, no, they probably couldn’t, to be honest. But that’s due to their own lack of software and/or hardware skills or vision or guts or whatever.
I think the big breakthrough with it all is the distribution model. It’s an easy way for developers to cash in one a few weekends work, and distribute their creations to millions at no cost to themselves.
The big challenge for Windows developers will be picking up Objective C, which is a rare language for developers to have, being half way between C and C++, and a way off the current VM paradigm of most .NET and Java developers.
That said I’ve got a few ideas swimming around my head already, so making the investment to learn the Mac’s language of choice and their SDK (which sounds like it’s pretty much as it is for OS X macs) makes a lot of sense when I can sell my work at $5 to 1 million people.
Fab that it is simply MacOS-X Cocoa based (I’m do lots of mac work) so should dove-tail in nicely, but I wonder if the 30% fee might be a wee bit hefty compared to currently-accepted norms for third-party software-royalty handling organisations?
Andrew in my experience I’ve see 50% is charged in some places. In Enterprise Software the channel may cost 50-60% .
30% seemed to me to be a magic number. Still chunky but under the pain threshold. it also includes the credit card fee. I thought it was a savvy %age to go for.
Hi Rob; I appreciate what you’re saying, but for such a service as this the “software store” is providing, I cannot help but to compare it with something like “www.shareit.com” who I use for products I ship where the percentage is more like 5-10%. It may turn out that in time, the overall platform, the delivery channel and the ease of use for a developer to move software means this is actually good value — time will tell. :)
The 30 / 70 rev split seems fair to me. Similar royalties are paid on the new game console download model, Xbox Live Arcade, Sony PSN etc and many developers are making good money charging $10 a game on development budgets of USD$300 - $600k. (10m ‘online’ install base for Xbox360)
Surely smaller apps without heavy graphic / animation requirements will be positioned to do well. The major question I have is will ‘grey market’ iphone users be able to engage these services with hacked / custom firmware phones. Will they want to pay for content they are currently getting for free? How will your application stand out in what is quickly going to be a flooded market?
Monthly payments is very attractive instead of the usual quarterly + 45 days, and the low hardware dev kit costs are impressive.
Anyone else get the feeling we’re at the starting line of a new land grab / gold rush? Exciting :D
“But Apple is tightly in control of the distribution and gets to clip 30% of each application sale as well as control what is on the device.”
Hmm, it sounds a bit like Brew to me and all that horrible Qualcomm control. Why do Telco’s (and now Apple) insist on owning the platform? It’s not an approach that put “A PC on Every Desk”.
Here is another quite thoughtful take on yesterday’s announcements:
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080307054430261
Watched the video and then I found this little beauty:
From the secret diary of steve jobs.
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/happy-now-bitches.html