g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Friday, January 12, 2007
17:41 - New Era, New Acolytes

(top)
What's struck me in recent days about the revelations that the iPhone will not be open to third-party app development is the near-unanimity of the Mac punditosphere in panning the decision.

Usually, when there's negative reaction to some Apple announcement, it's tempered by a groundswell of support both from thoughtful analysts with a sober long view and a feeling for why Apple might have made such a decision, and from the dyed-in-the-wool anything-Apple-does-is-by-definition-good ranks. But not here. Pretty much everyone thinks this sucks, and probably rightly so.

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.

“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.”

I think Steve might have bitten off more than he can chew. He thinks that because Apple managed to nail the balance of conceptual simplicity and customizability in the iPod, after a long history of doing similar things with the desktop computer, he has an implicit insight into the phone market's dynamics that the phone makers haven't been able to capture up till now.

I think it's entirely likely that Steve plans to aim the iPhone at non-geeky customers, the kind who would have avoided buying Blackberries and Smartphones because they're too threatening and weird; if so, then a closed platform makes sense, because the target market wouldn't be likely to try to hack their phones anyway. But at the same time, maybe it's a bit premature for John Gruber to conclude:

Remember back in November when Palm CEO Ed Colligan was quoted saying, with regard to a then-hypothetical Apple phone, “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Guess what? They’re just walking in.

Yeah, and they seem to be stumbling, too.

Apple, Inc. is being positioned as "the next thirty years" of the company—a new direction, a new focus that encompasses mobile devices, phones, set-top boxes, and—who knows—probably TVs and home audio gear and stuff, with desktop and laptop computers still the core of the business, but a far less important slice of the pie than before. (The parallel to Sony has been noted in several places already, much good may it do Apple.) But while it might be the right direction for a company following the lucre, especially for a Steve who envisions a world where every technological gadget that people interact with sports an Apple logo and a Jonny Ive design, it's a move that comes with some possibly unforeseen traps—not least of which is a whole new set of customers. Phone customers, in this case. People with a different set of expectations about what their gear can and should do than, probably, Steve Jobs has in mind.

He may have explicitly set out to change people's expectations of their technology, to literally reinvent the industry just through the contact high of his presence. He may even succeed, in the long run. But in recent interviews, he's acting like he's taken aback that people would have any negative reaction at all—that it hadn't entered his mind that people would shun the iPhone just because it's not open to third-party software. They're not following the script he's got laid out for them, honed and tweaked from years of experience with computers and iPods. Trouble is, they're not all the same people. (For the first time, for example, I am not part of his target demographic at all.) And just as he gambled and won by bringing the iPod to Windows, garnering such a huge audience overnight that it engulfed Apple in the tsunami of money that enabled it to buy its way into this new era, now he's gambling on marrying Apple technology—and black-box design sensibilities—to a market that potentially has a lot of money to spend. But it is a gamble... and it might not pay off.

Fortunately, there's an upside: Steve has six months to change his mind, essentially without technical cost. A reversal on his stated policy would make headlines; it's not the kind of thing he's accustomed to doing, nor the industry watchers are accustomed to seeing him do. But Apple, Inc. is a new company, serving new markets; and Mercurial Steve Jobs might have to do some dancing if he wants this new transition, like so many before it, to benefit from the charmed life that's followed him through an endless stream of improbable technical and political victories ever since he returned to the company.

UPDATE: It does sure look like the lockdown is at Cingular's behest.

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© Brian Tiemann