After being burned twice by software developers, Steve learned his lesson. The mac needed more software, it needed something unique to take advantage of the beautiful GUI and the revolutionary mouse, but it didn’t have it. Not on launch day anyway. The NeXT computer needed great third party software to take advantage of its powerful OS, but it never got it. Not even after everyone started repeating how Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT Cube to invent the web. For those products, Steve didn’t have any leverage over the software companies forcing them to write great and unique software. And without it, why would you buy a machine that can do exactly the same, or even less, of what your machine does now?
With that in mind, when he got back to Apple, he took a completely different approach. All the unique features of the hardware and all the APIs in the OS have to be shown to consumers in ways that make them go ‘wow, I’ve never seen that before’. So for the original iMac they did iMovie, to highlight the new firewire port and the fast G3 processor. They needed to tell people that the iMac was great at something that they couldn’t even try to do on any other consumer PC. That thinking eventually got us the iLife suite, which is often regarded as one of the main reasons why people switch to the mac. And yes, eventually adobe brought back Premier to the mac. They did Photoshop Elements. Eventually we got Picasa. And after 18 years Autodesk brought Autocad back to the Mac. I we had to wait 18 years for Autocad, can you imagine what would have happened if they never released iLife? Clearly, Steve couldn’t trust third party developers.
So this is why I have mixed feelings about John Siracusa’s idea of the Apple Strategy Tax. He thinks that Apple is in conflict with itself by being both, the platform vendor and a service provider on top of the platform. I partially agree with him, and I too think that if they are not careful, they are gonna found themselves in a situation where the top third party service providers are gonna question whether or not competing against Apple is worth the trouble. But I also think there is more to it than that. Apple needed to provide those services in order to highlight the devices they were selling, because specs alone don’t sell. Ask the Apple of the 90’s, ask NeXT, ask Motorola in a couple of months. You have to tell the whole story, how your product uses all that technology to do things better and faster, things that are not even possible on other devices. And you can’t trust third party developers to do it for you.
Let’s recap a minute, and examine the last 10 years
2003, 3rd Generation iPod
The iPod started the digital revolution, but not immediately when it was launched, but when the iTunes Music Store was introduced. It was the best way to legally buy digital music and listen to it on the go. One click purchase and syncing. It was the simplest solution, even if iTunes on Windows wasn’t the best.
2005, iPod Video
TV shows and music videos were introduced to the store at the same time that the iPod Video was introduced to the world. Before there was no place to buy tv shows online. The networks were opposed to the idea but Apple felt that the only way they could add video to the iPod was if they could get content for it. And that meant doing business with the networks. And because no one wanted to take that risk, they only got Disney to do it with them.
2007, Apple TV
After doing TV shows movies was the next logical step. But Apple didn’t feel comfortable bringing digital movies to computers when you could already watch DVDs and videos from the web. They weren’t gonna add any value to the PC by selling movies to them. You could make the case that movies alone could have made the iTunes Store more successful, but then again, they have always said that they store doesn’t generate any profits, and is just there to add value to the devices. So they waited until they had a device that needed that value. They waited until Apple TV.
Can you imagine what would have happened if Apple would have let third parties take care of this? The iPod wouldn’t have happened, thats for sure. But along the way, Apple grew, they grew a lot. They became the number one music distributor on the planet and the number one MP3 player vendor. They became a media darling with an incredible come back story, and third party developers became interested in Apple again.
2007, iPhone
The iPhone was announced as being three devices into one. It was a cell phone, a widescreen iPod and a internet communicator. And for each of these devices, they had at least one ‘killer app’. They had the phone app, the sms app and visual voicemail, they had the iPod app with video, and they had safari, google maps, and mail. From day one it was a perfectly usable device. You weren’t waiting for a third party developer to release a version of a plugin that would make google maps useful. Everything was there from day one. It was so good, so complete (by comparison), that they could go a year without third party apps and still be the most advanced phone on the market. And at some point they even question the decision to bring third party apps at all.
So that brings us to 2010…What could they announce next? is it gonna be just a big iPod touch? well, whatever it is I can’t see myself buying it because everything I ever want to do I can do with my iPhone and my Mac. Right?
2010, iPad
The iPad wasn’t an apparent hit to everyone. It did everything, but then again, you could do everything on every other device. What they had perfected, in a way, was the experience, they made it more personal, more casual, more intimate. But you can’t sell a device with just magical buzzwords. So they decided to do it with books. The Kindle made the whole ebooks idea seem hip, interesting, and they saw an opportunity of improving it while showcasing the iPad’s strengths. Better screen and direct manipulation via multitouch gestures. So they made an app, a gorgeous app to look at, the kind of app that people show their friends when trying to impress them, and they even included awesome-but-pointless page turning effects complete with dynamics. The app was impressive, but it was useless unless you could get books on it. And before you say that you could get any .epub file on it, let me tell you that i was talking about legal copies of books. So they created iBookstore, with a simple interface tied to the same iTunes Store account, made for an easy demo.
Each of this products needed a way to get customers into the store and get them interested enough to want to give them a try and probably buy one. I’m assuming Apple know that most people don’t buy that much tv shows, or rent a lot of movies. No one uses FaceTime after the first week, but without those services the iPod Video and the Apple TV are pointless. And the font-facing camera becomes the same novelty that phones manufacturers have been adding since the end of the 90s. They needed those services to be available on day one. They need to control them. Thats why a music app or a web browser is considered to be duplicating core functionality, because in the eyes of Apple, they are duplicating the one thing that people enter the store for.
Even more, to make this devices a success, Apple have done all the work. They did the hardware, the software, and the services, and it worked great for them. But now, they have iOS, and everyone wants to get in on it. But they can’t trust developers, because they have been burned in the past. They know that they are ahead now, but they can’t trust anyone to stay there, so they made iMove and Garageband for the iPad to show everyone how far Android apps are lagging. They need to be in control of their future, not Adobe, not Google. Thats why they banned Flash development from the App store. And thats why we get this new subscriptions rule. Trust.
As long as Apple can’t trust developers, they are gonna want to be everything to all people.
Update
It seems that I wasn’t entirely clear with my decision to use the word ‘trust’ . The main question seems to be,
Apple has over 400.000 apps on the App Store, then, how can they not trust developers?
The point I’m trying to make isn’t that Apple is not willing to work with developers on improving the platform, or in creating new uses for their devices. You can see their disposition every time they invite a third party developer on stage to talk about their apps, and how much money the are making from them. What I was referring to was the idea of the complete experience of a product from day one. Every aspect of the hardware has to have a counterpart in the software that can be used in a real world scenario. They would never include a hardware component without a killer way to take advantage of it in the software on day one. And for strategic reasons they have to control that software. Case and Point: FaceTime. There were videoconferencing apps before it, even on the App Store, but Apple felt that they were not showcasing the full potential of the new device, so they made their own. You may say that it’s just videoconferencing and that Skype already did everything. To that I tell you, Skype was not ready to take advantage of both cameras, they could only use the one on the back, so if you wanted to use the new front facing camera on day one, you simply couldn’t. You had to wait for Skype to issue and update. How is that a complete experience?. By contrast Motorola seems fine shipping a Barometer and even a SD card slot that have no use at all on day one, or shipping 4G support when they don’t have the hardware for it. When they announced the iPad they explicitly said that it needed to be better than a laptop and a phone on two key areas: browsing the web and reading ebooks. They already had a killer mobile browser in the form of safari, what they didn’t have was an ebook reader, so they made iBooks.
This is what I mean when I say ‘trust’. They are never going to trust a third party with a core competency of the device. Even if the software or service already exists. The only difference now, is that the device does so much, that they are stepping on everyone’s toes.
And thats the main idea behind John Siracusa’s article, they are now on both sides, and this could end up badly for Apple. The new subscription rules are just the latest expression of this internal discrepancy, as was the rule to ban apps created using Flash from the app store, and rejecting Google Voice from it altogether. I’m sure there are gonna be at list a couple more before Apple decides to or is forced to change their ways.
