“Overall, it is deeply impressive how many things Apple got right [with their iPhone/iPod touch SDK],” Michael Mace blogs for Mobile Opportunity.
MacDailyNews Note: Michael Mace is a principal at Rubicon Consulting, and former Chief Competitive Officer and VP of Product Planning at Palm, former VP of Strategic Marketing at PalmSource, and former director of Mac Platform Marketing at Apple.
Mace writes, “We still need to see more details on terms and conditions, and a lot will depend on Apple’s execution, but here are the problems they appear to have solved:”
• Making mobile applications easy for users to find and install
• Not taking too large a cut from developers for their third party app store
• Streamlining the app certification process
• Exposing a very deep and rich API set
• Kleiner Perkins’ $100 million venture iFund for iPhone developers. “Makes Google’s $10m contest for Android developers look like a popgun.”
“It has been obvious for at least six years that all of these changes were needed in the mobile market, but until now no one in the US and Europe has had the courage / political muscle / intelligence to carry them all out. The other mobile platforms now look pretty pathetic by comparison,” Mace writes.
“Nokia seems to be focused on a strategic positioning activity around seeing who can collect the most runtimes, while Apple is solving real developer and user problems,” Mace writes. “It’s a striking contrast.”
“Right now Apple is changing the terms of the competition faster than the other guys can react, which is exactly the right way to beat a group of larger competitors,” Mace writes.
More in the full article – recommended – here.
I didn’t watch the SDK-event until yesterday and missed most of the ballyhoo while travelling, but I think Apple and Steve are out for the kill and won’t take any prisoners!
There’s nothing like fresh smell of napalm in the morning
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“There’s nothing like fresh smell of napalm in the morning”
I prefer the smell of my girlfriend in the morning. To each his own?
@ Ampar :
Very poetic… ( I like the way think)
= )
To Dev Singh:
P.S. And yes, I also appreciate the “Apocalypse Now” reference.
Not really fair to depict Mike Mace as a Palm guy. He has been anti-Palm for over 3 years now. It’s not as if he just left the company when iPhone came out.
Although I agree with his assertions and some of yours, this is not a fair appraisal. I have had email contact with Mike about 2 years ago and even before the iPhone he was very critical of Palm and its management team and felt that they had dropped the ball on innovation. The Lifedrive was one of the major flaws. They had a gold mine in their hands, but fumbled because they did not want to change the operating system. They went through OS 6 without ever releasing it; sold off the software division of the company, which included Linux (?? OS7) and then turned around and started from scratch after they decided that they wanted to use Linux.
Now they are 2 years late from releasing a Linux mobile device. Everything has and is going wrong there and Mike has been on it since around ’06.