WWDC 2014: The most significant event Apple ever staged

“Dan Niles, a former analyst who is now a portfolio manager, said on a CNBC appearance that the WWDC event actually had nothing of any real meat for investors.” — From Worldwide Developer’s Conference Prompts Analysts to Raise Apple Price Targets, 24/7 Wall St.

“The ‘investors’ that Dan Niles refers to are undoubtedly those who invest (or, more accurately, speculate with) money. But the audience for the event was an entirely different set of investors. These investors invest their passion, intellect and a substantial fraction of their lives with Apple,” Horace Dediu writes for Asymco. “For them WWDC had a great deal of meat. Indeed, for them, it was probably the most significant event Apple ever staged.”

“The path to realizing this is to imagine the world as the ‘D’ in WWDC see it. Developers don’t just build. Using an analogy of building or construction, they are architects and designers as well as contractors and craftsmen and artists as well as builders. And not of just of houses but of cities and communities. They see and think through tools and techniques for building and innovations in building materials. Innovations which allow them to imagine first and, later, to build new cities in ways that were never before possible,” Dediu writes. “We were therefore witnesses to an event which was, in essence, a cement conference. A new building material was introduced along with the methods for using it and the tools for shaping it. Perhaps some observers expected to see skyscrapers and interstate highways presented, and thus were disappointed. But they should not have had such expectations.”

Dediu writes, “This was the way I saw WWDC 2014. A cement conference cheered by cement enthusiasts but leaving Architectural Digest writers asking what the fuss was all about.”

Read more in the full article here.

17 Comments

  1. It was a developers conference, and in my opinion the best keynote apple has ever done.

    It set the foundations for the next 10yrs for the developers, who are one of the most important groups for apple to survive and thrive in the future.

    1. It’s been said a million times, but this WWDC really felt like a coming out party for Federighi. The future looks very very bright for Apple, especially with him at the helm (of Software dev at least). 🙂

  2. At WWDC 2014, Apple took down barriers and battlements, cleared difficult ground of rubble and old wreckage, and provisioned an army of fresh troops with wondrous new armament. The battle is joined.

  3. I installed Yosemite and Xcode.

    Started my first swift project.

    Wow! This is going to make C as easy as BASIC.

    Ok, bad comparison, but Apple certainly seemed to hide a great majority of the complexity of coding iOS and OSX programs.

    This is going to be fun!

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