Update 3:39pm 6/22: Minor changes in references from Xcode to Objective-C made. Thanks to Mike Rundle (@flyosity) for pointing out the error. Something bothered me about those paragraphs when I wrote them and Mike clarified what it was.
Steve Jobs and Apple are interesting and unique stories in American business. Wildly successful, they generate a degree of compassion, excitement, and coverage that’s disproportionate to even their level of success.
Apple has often been the tech industry’s trend-setter, from GUIs to mice to WiFi, and now tablets, mobile apps, and even music and movies. Where Apple goes, the tech industry follows.
This is to Apple’s credit. They are tough competitors and, unwilling to simply follow others, they’re often out front, either with trend-setting designs, breakthrough technologies, or both.
But despite their old marketing campaign, Apple is not the company “for the rest of us.” Apple’s primary goal is meeting Apple’s goals, often without regard to who is hurt along the way.
Of course, Apple is not alone in this behavior. When Palm moved from Palm OS to webOS, they purposely left many of their third-party developers behind. Whether that was good for the company in the long run is still unclear, especially in light of the HP acquisition. But their actions definitely hurt thousands of small developers and cost jobs.
Weirdly, Apple seems to be almost purposely searching out segments of the tech industry to destroy. Whether it’s Apple’s war against Flash, its completely capricious application review and denial process, the way its terms of service intend to lock out third-party ad companies like AdMob, its option to remove of all Web-based advertising from Safari, its lock-out of any development environment besides Xcode language besides Objective-C, or even the company’s complete lack of acknowledgment of Mac developers at its recent World-Wide Developer’s Conference, Apple seems determined to undermine developers and their ability to make a living.
You could argue, of course, that Apple is performing like any mega-corporation, putting the interests of its shareholders above those of its so-called partners. But Apple has always positioned itself as the company of the Volksputer, the people’s computer, using ad themes like “The computer for the rest of us” and “Think different.”
The pain Apple is causing developers
The issue isn’t that Apple is making internal changes based on where it wants its technology to go. The issue is both a matter of timing and the pain its causing developers.
Take Flash, for example. No one argues that Flash is the very best media production format, but it is very broad reaching. More importantly, it’s an environment that many companies use, and many individual programmers have taken the time to develop expertise with. By blasting Flash and Adobe, the collateral damage is to all those little development companies and all those developers, many of whom may find themselves without an income stream.
