| Wednesday, October 17, 2007 |
14:22 - We weren't stopping you, Steve
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/
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"Let me just say it" sounds to me like Steve would rather have avoided even having had to talk about an iPhone/iPod touch SDK for third-party apps. Like in his ideal world, nobody would even have thought about making their own programs for the iPhone until the day that Apple magically, unexpectedly unveiled the development kit.
I'd say it's possible, even probable, as Glenn Fleishmann suggests, that the Leopard ship date delay is what's to blame for all this confusion. Like maybe Steve wanted Leopard and the iPhone to show up more or less at the same time, or like within a month of each other. Then everything SDK-related that depends on Leopard would already be finished by the time the iPhone went to market. But as it is (or was before today), now they have to stand and grin and talk about the weather for six months while they pretend there ain't no SDK and there never was.
So now Steve has to put on the "friendly uncle" persona (complete with first-name-basis signature) and let us all in on the big secret, like he's wrapping an arm around all our collective shoulders and whispering so nobody else hears. Yep: SDK comin'. February. In the future, that time we don't like to talk about, but there's no way around it this time, ya figured me out; you all are just too smart for your old Uncle Steve. Just sit tight till February. Wish it coulda been October, but you know how things go.
What'll be interesting to see is whether this delay will have created a drain on the momentum of the third-party app community that would not have been as severe if the SDK had been available, or at least announced, before today. Or would the few pieces of anti-iPhone buzz that we've seen thus far have not themselves existed if Steve had just announced the SDK at the outset, even if it were for a later release?
It sorta seems like this is Apple making the best of a bad situation, one that's only "bad" because of a miscalculation of the market. They're trying to salvage their pride now. If they'd had it to do over again, they'd have pre-announced the SDK much earlier, or better yet, avoided the Leopard delay to begin with. But now the worst thing they could have done would have been to sit on the SDK news until February and then release it as a surprise, all the while in between pretending that the iPhone is forever meant to be a closed platform and further straining Apple's uncomfortable relationship with the developers they currently have to actively thwart from doing what they want to do with their phones.
Time to win some hearts and minds back, Uncle Steve?
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Brian Tiemann
