The days of head-to-head competition in the personal computing marketplace are over. In the arena of personal computing it’s clear that Wintel won a long time ago, it would be foolish for a company with as miniscule a marketshare as Apple to try to compete straight on with the Microsoft behemoth. So, rather brilliantly, they went at it sideways. Sentiments have changed both on the level of the PC geek and that of Apple’s corporate face. Even from the mouth of the big Apple themselves, there seems to be less animosity concerning the competition, at least in the rhetoric. Instead of complaining that they only have five to ten percent of the consumer PC market-share, they are doing something about it.
That’s not to say that Apple and Microsoft have a rosy, touchy-feely kind of relationship, but there is less ick factor when working with the other guys. The recent licensing of Exchange to make the iPhone a viable solution for enterprises is something that smacks of “I don’t want to use your technology if I don’t have to, but I will sacrifice to make my product better.” Before I delve too far into my main argument, I would just like to point out that Exchange support is both, something that I never really thought would happen, and something that apparently had to happen to make iPhone a serious contender for big businesses and their corporate IT infrastructure. I had naively thought that maybe IT personnel would embrace more open standards like IMAP, but then I realized that IT departments don’t change, we flex and bend to their will.
However, this illustrates the main point of this article quite excellently; sideways strategy. Apple is succeeding in creating markets that exist on the same platform as Macintosh development, but are running parallel to the main business model. Apple chooses either an undefined market or one that has little strong competition and embraces it to create insanely great products for that market, which then often go on to dominate it. Then it exploits the resources garnered from one arena to further development. It is quite simply a brilliant strategy that I think follows from a sideways application of the “defeat in detail” policy in military tactics. Clearly Apple’s goal is to outlast their competitors and make more money than them, however the head-to-head competition of days gone by in markets gone by is long dead. Only a fool would try to fight a battle on the enemy’s terms. iPhone is a conduit to get people who wouldn’t normally develop for Macs on to the platform.
Consider these; the iPhone dev kit is Mac only, the moment that Unca Steve unveiled iPhone in January of 2007 the first thing that many people said was “Gimme,” the second was “I want to write software for this.” The iPhone SDK uses nearly the same API’s that Mac developers use (this is a twofold argument) Cocoa, Core Audio, etc. So in order for a developer to write software for the iPhone, he essentially has to learn how to program for Mac OS X. This gives existing Mac developers first throw at the dev dartboard to try out ideas that they may have already used on the Macintosh. However, they like everyone else are going to have to relearn the idea of a completely different idea of user interface and ways of interacting with items on the screen. As was witnessed by last month’s iPhone SDK announcements, there were several companies that had never really worked with Mac development before that were all over the development of native iPhone software, AOL being the most prominent. If the AOL programmers were so willing to work in the iPhone OS, which is essentially a toned down version of Mac OS X, without ever having worked in a Mac environment before then it is quite reasonable to expect that other companies would be willing to work with iPhone APIs. The point there is that the iPhone APIs are the same as the Mac ones; software developers who are writing for iPhone are writing for Macs as well and they just don’t know it yet.
While I’m very excited about the kinds of very cool software that could be heading to Mobile OS X (iPod touch owner here), I think that the potential for new and great software from makers who wouldn’t normally touch the Macintosh platform with a ten meter science pole. Not that I’m really expecting a portable version of The Orange Box, but more and more developers will be exposed to things like Objective-C and thus there may be some impetus for cool things to come to the Mac. The other thing that really excited me about the iPhone SDK and the potential effects that it might have on the Mac platform is games. As you may know gentle reader, there are a few things that I do with my Macintosh. Like most people I browse the internet, manage a music/movie collection, manage email accounts, try to bring some semblance of order to my digital and meat life, process photos, manage some miscellaneous projects including this writing thing, and play games. Unlike many a naysayer, I don’t feel that Mac gaming is dead. It has never really been that popular even in the heyday, but I refuse to declare it dead. I like to play games, both what one would call casual, Peggle has fast become a vice of mine, and the “real” games like Command and Conquer 3 and Civilization 4. For the longest time I was consigned to the fact that Mac gaming would never be as popular as it was on the PC side of things. The dominance of DirectX and Windows APIs made this a fact. The idea that I would have to put up with buggy ports from overburdened port-houses, offensive as it was, being treated as a second-class computing citizen was also expected.
The fact that of the five demos at the iPhone SDK, two of them were game demos. And not just Solitaire or BackGammon, they were “real” games. If PC game developers get excited about delivering games to the iPhone OS then it would stand to follow that they might consider going the extra few feet and make it Mac compatible as well. While I never really expect people like the folks at Valve to be behind iPhone games, at least not with the powerful first person shooters that they are known for, but if we get them peripherally involved with a smaller more casual game, then they might make that extra effort to hit it on to the desktop market. The same resources are used to create an iPhone game that would be used to create a Mac OS X game; OpenGL, Open AL, etc. The potential is just staggering when you think about it.
Not only does this allow a sideways entry for games into the Mac market (an arena that many were calling dead and that would take an act of Steve to revive), but there are other interesting possibilities as well. Taking into account the mindshare aspect, we start to look at the enterprise features and getting iPhones and thus the iPhone OS into big businesses that wouldn’t even dream of including Macs in their infrastructure. It’s like a Trojan horse and it worked the same way with iPods, although iPhone is much more potent. Not only do more people own mobile phones than portable music players, but iPhones are much more interactive than iPods in terms of what you can do with them. Add to the fact that you need to have a Mac to write software we have an insidious plan by the powers that be to insert Apple into the mindshare of not only the unwashed masses, but the corporate elite, and the technorati that influence the course of the high tech industry and eventually exert pressure on the direction of the whole sphere.
