Apple killing iPhone cross-compilers in 2010 like they killed Mac clones in 1997?
Apple has recently made headlines for banning cross-compilers in iPhone OS 4 SDK, and Steve Jobs fleshed out the specifics in his Thoughts on Flash open letter. This is nothing new. Back in September 1997, Apple and Steve Jobs made headlines for killing something else -- the Mac clones. And as is often the case, the past sheds some interesting light on the present and future of Apple and the iPhone and iPad. This is what Doc Searls wrote about it at the time:
To Steve, clones are the drag of the ordinary on the innovative. All that crap about cloners not sharing the cost of R&D is just rationalization. Steve puts enormous value on the engines of innovation. Killing off the cloners just eliminates a drag on his own R&D, as well as a way to reposition Apple as something closer to what he would have made the company if he had been in charge through the intervening years.
[...] These things I can guarantee about whatever Apple makes from this point forward:
- It will be original.
- It will be innovative.
- It will be exclusive.
- It will be expensive.
- It's aesthetics will be impeccable.
- The influence of developers, even influential developers like you, will be minimal.
- The influence of customers and users will be held in even higher contempt.
- The influence of fellow business artisans such as Larry Ellison (and even Larry's nemesis, Bill Gates) will be significant, though secondary at best to Steve's own muse.
Substitute clones for cross-compilers, pick up an iPhone or iPad, and the post is both still relevant and uncannily prescient.
[Scripting.com DaveNet, thanks to Dev for sending this in!]
Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler.
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The problem I had with Doc Searls' article then and now is that it completely redirects away from the true point. Even with Steve, you have to follow the money.
Clones were canabalizing Apple sales. Period. Steve probably enjoyed it for the reasons Doc points out, but the real reason is that clones were not making money for Apple, they were taking money away. The licensing deal was poorly done and most expensive Mac-OS based computers were Macs themselves, everything else was cheaper.
Same thing with cross compilers. The true threat of cross compilers is to iAd, the new ad service. Cross compilers allow people to create ads just as interesting as iAd without going thru Apple. Steve is simply blocking competition at the ad level. There is a possibility this will reduce the ability to port some games to other platforms, giving Apple a small edge, but in this case it means taking flash ads and compiling them in some way into your apps to compete head to head with iAd.
The key here is that it's true that Steve has his own muse about how things should work, but it's not true he doesn't listen. He listens to his friends Franklin, Grant, Jefferson, Hamilton, Lincoln and Washington.
a list so good it has a hidden 7
Too bad they didn't kill the biggest mac clone ever - WINDOWS.
Anyway, this isn't comparable to cross compiling. It'd be more like if Apple killed all the iPhone lookalikes.
I still have my IMAX clone from '97 in storage. It sports a whopping 2GB HD!
I really do need to recycle it, or toss it, or something, one of these days.
Must be a slow news day.
Mark Hernandez The Information Workshop
@Rob
Original list does not have that extra 7. (oops Rene)
@fastlane
I am looking over at my PowerComputing PowerTower Pro150 right now. Memories...
(and yes, killing the clone market set back Mac hardware (not software) innovation quite a bit...
@fastlane: I hope you mean Umax! I have my beloved modded and cooled C500s (one with a Sonnet G4, the other with a Umax Speedcache in the socket with a Umax 240MHz 603e that I had to carve up the chassis to clear!) love them boxes, I wonder if they still boot! Got them for a song from Small Dog a million years ago.
Had a nifty S900 that I had to recycle--the drive door was broken, my favorite part of the case. Got some Umax/Supermac and some Power Computing paraphernalia to archive, ebay, craigslist or trash, LOL.
@SheiknetChris:
Yes, UMAX! LOL! (I knew something didn't look right about it).
I've been going to the IMAX theater a bit too much.
A poor comparison indeed. Instead, what Apple has done pushes a major software vendor, i.e. Adobe, into the arms of its key competitor Google (Adobe will launch the new Flash running on Android in Google I/O conference this week). It is more like Apple in 1984 when the innovative Macintosh was born but years later a series of missteps put Apple to the brink of extinction.
What I do see is that Apple gambles when it boils down to taking strategic decisions : they hit the jackpot the last 5 years with Ipods/Iphones/Ipads,... but they are at risk of making a wrong turn more than other companies. So many of us became believers recently and are happy campers with the goods we got, but the bar is high and Apple can't afford making mistakes now, it would not be forgiven. Killing Flash, cross-compilers, porn apps, etc... don't seem to be doing them much harm so far, so let's wait and see. Computing hasn't been as exciting in years !!!!
Points 6 and 7 are so annoyingly true. Its just hard to spend money with companies that look at you like you were vermin.
But I don't see this as anything at all related to killing cross compilers. Lets face it, that move was an attack on Adobe, and developers that want to develop for other platforms concurrent with development for the iPhone.
Apple is just driving developers cost up if they want to develop apps for multiple platforms. You now need two coders sitting side by side writing the same code.
And people that use smart toolsets that can take one bit of code and massage it to run on multiple platforms are just SOL.
Steve is betting ONE PHONE and ONE iPAD can stand against 30 Android devices from 6 or 8 companies simply by denying that they exist.