Many of us believe that collaborative, social, strategies and tools can benefit the marketplace, companies, their vendors, their customers. Countless case studies, interviews, and various other examples abound that show the positive benefits to sales, marketing, customer support, and throughout and across all functions. The benefits range from product and service co-creation to improved customer satisfaction to more seemless sharing of knowledge within organizations.
A push for transparency, engagement, and collaboration has swept the public and private sector, with politicians, federal agencies, businesses, and people seeking to understand how they can leverage new strategies and tools to improve their ability to meet their goals. While we are not experiencing a revolution, we are clearly seeing an evolution of business and governments.
Apple, however, remains one of the more successful companies determined to do its own thing. It’s own thing in this case, however, is to act every bit the anti-social, monopolistic, and self-centric company that represents the old way of doing business. It’s recent move to block out its partners and competitors from developing the widest set of applications for the iPhone 4.0 SDK demonstrates this point clearly:
“Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited)…”
If Microsoft had made a similar move back in the late 1990s it would have been dragged into court immediately. Apple, beyond reversing this ridiculous licensing change, should consider becoming a more collaborative company and embrace your developer community. Form a working counsel to review licensing changes, hearing alternative viewpoints could be beneficial. While you are at it, consider a more open review process for applications to make it into your App Store, this is too opaque a process as it stands today.
While customers are in love with your hardware today we have all seen how proprietary solutions and products fair in the long run. You are having your day in the sun now, consider making changes before it turns cloudy outside.
John
April 15, 2010 at 9:18 pm
Flash in NOT proprietary??? HTML5 is a much more open standard than Flash. Go Apple, you are doing us all a favor keeping Flash off your platform.
April 15, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Flash is proprietary, you are right. However, Flash runs on 98% of the machines in the known universe (okay, I may be pushing it
) and is therefore as common a delivery tool as exist today.
I do appreciate the comment though, I know this is a hot button issue with strong opinions and good arguments on both sides.
John
April 11, 2010 at 8:26 pm
What do you mean “lock out competition”? Its their platform. If you want competition, its in the developers, not the toolkit for developing native apps. The only ones complaining are Adobe and Flash developers. Sorry guys, if you want to write an iPhone app, learn Objective-C. Or write a web app. Its that simple.
A phone is not an open platform. It is not the PC industry. It is closed by nature. Follow the rules set by the owner of the OS or don’t bother playing.
John Gruber summed it up best.
http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_331
And Daniel Eran Dilger added some good points as well.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/04/10/five-tremendous-apple-vs-adobe-flash-myths/
April 11, 2010 at 5:24 pm
John, I always seem torn on this one. However, it will be fun to watch the next Apple round as the iPad moves forward. Aaron
April 11, 2010 at 7:09 am
Not sure Apple needs to change its model. The comparison with the Microsoft of the in the late 90s is interesting, but though Apple is popular it just does not have the market share and influence of Microsoft.
April 11, 2010 at 12:35 pm
Thank you, appreciate the comment. While Microsoft was far larger in the 90s than Apple is now their control of the tablet and mobile market is growing, their ability to lock out the competition is the same for these markets.
John
April 12, 2010 at 10:24 pm
I concede that their actions can potentially lock out the competition, but the bulk of their success is tied more to the quality and marketing of their products. In the end most consumers are indifferent to whether Apple is collaborative or not as long as they like the product. The interesting part is whether Apple can sustain ‘anti-social’ behavior when Jobs is no longer around to lead.
April 11, 2010 at 4:18 am
While I entirely agree with your points regarding the changes and the fact that Apple is not changing I am not convinced that they are making a mistake or being left behind.
Is it not true that their controlling ways are providing a more predictable and even superior user experience in many ways?
I use a PC and an iPhone and Apple’s ways seem to be doing a pretty good job of providing hardware and software for specific uses.
In some cases those that go against the grain are called the leaders and their stock is up, so I am holding off on judging them. Not every business can be transparent, don’t you agree?
I got here via Twitter.
April 11, 2010 at 12:39 pm
Thanks Jim, appreciate you stopping in and sincerely appreciate the comments. I agree fully that their controlling ways provide a more seemless, less error-prone experience. I would argue that Microsoft could have made the same argument to lockout competitors by locking down applications to certain languages and APIs.
However, if Apple chose to embrace the larger community and bring them into the process I feel they would benefit as much as their customers and vendors would as well. Would overall quality of applications decrease? Perhaps, but the customers would, and do, gravitate to the products and solutions that meet their needs at satisfactory quality levels. Poor products will be weeded out by the marketplace, not by Apple.
John
April 11, 2010 at 12:26 am
I’d rather agree with John. its not good for business.
April 10, 2010 at 11:39 pm
I’d rather Apple keep doing exactly what they are doing.