This June: Apple will start selling software for Windows
Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited Vincent to write about innovative start ups based in the Netherlands, Apple, the media industry, incubators, business books and many other things that happen to interest him at the moment. Vince, they’re all yours!
You know, I always found it surprising that Apple started pre-announcing their products this year. What would be the business-sense for a company that has been doing so well in the rumour-market. Everyone was expecting Intel-Macs and Windows on Macs, but no one knew for sure. Everyone was expecting a media-console and an iPhone, but it was just a guess. Still, many of these products are becoming successful.
The iPhone is a different story though, entering a market that is saturated with phones that are cheaper or virtually free. Why enter such a market and why pre-announce it? It makes little business-sense to me, and I’m not alone.
But the mistake I made was to be blinded by the shiny device that Apple is throwing out there and seeing it as a stand-alone. Some of the biggest problems mentioned with the device was the saturated market and the fact that business-users, it’s primary market, would barely use it. And why would they, having already such brilliant (I exaggerate) integration of their existing devices with Microsoft’s suites?
If you remember, when the iPod launched, it wasn’t a big hit. The reason was because it was aimed at Mac-users. Apple got a clue though and as soon as it released software for Windows, the music-player soon became the hype. It is unlikely that they didn’t take this as a lesson for the future. Any device aimed at the Mac-market only, will only grab a tiny part of global market-share.
There is another piece of a puzzle that only Mac-users are likely aware of. The delay of the iWork and iLife-suities, which offer stuff like word-processing (Pages), presentations (Keynote), a speculated excel-app, an image manipulation app (iPhoto), iTunes, and Quicktime. This was expected at the beginning of this year, yet failed to show.
Now let’s think about this. Chances of mass-market adoption of a device aimed solely at Macs = low. Chances of the iPhone working flawlessly with existing Microsoft-solutions = low to medium (at least according to the latest Microsoft-rant). Chances that iPhone will come with software for windows = your guess is as good as mine, but I think the chances are medium to high.
A final piece of the puzzle is perhaps that Apple is said to restrict software for iPhone, due to reasons of security. Opening up to the Windows-OS does pose a security-issue, I can imagine, and it’s possible that they want to close holes on that side as much as possible. Another possibility is spill-over effects from software-vendors learning to play on both sides of the fence and finally deciding to move to the much bigger and profitable market of Windows instead.
This is of course all speculation and I take absolutely no responsibility if you or your business starts pre-ordering iPhones now!
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This is definitely not unwise.
One might also consider that Apple lacks engineers to steer up the development of Leopard, iPhone, iLife, Final Cut, touchscreen iPods, and iPod socks
I am aware of the public explanation for the delays, yes. That said, Apple is a big and established company and they really could have predicted a shortage in human resources for this. Hardware-delays I can understand, engineer-related somewhat less.
Incidentally, I first posted this point of view on a Mac-forum. Talk about writing for the wrong target-audience, as the odds are way against me (10 against, 1 (me) for). But people do have some insightful comments, and I’m hoping to convince those guys slowly but surely.
Hello Folks,
> Why enter such a market and why pre-announce it?
> It makes little business-sense to me, and I’m not alone.
Simple : it’s called market disruption. Apple has the power to change such a market, as they did with the iPod in the Music industry.
IMHO, the question should be : why would Apple NOT enter the Mobile industry ?… Provided that the convergence is truly on its way, not being part of the game would be a great mistake.
The iPhone is JUST the begining. Nobody outside Infinite Loop knows Apple’s roadmap, but its very key partners such as Intel, however I bet the iPhone is the first product of a new kind of devices to be introduced by the Mac maker (never forget the Mac : it’s the central piece of Apple’s long term strategy). Plus, the iPhone must be considered as a test-bed for new technologies and/or user-experience propositions : the multi-touch U.I. is one instance among many others.
So, start to Think Different, Buddies
_Marc
That’s a good point Marc. My question is more whether the iPhone alone will be enough for business-users on the Windows-platform or will we be seeing a broader offering to this group.
There is one more thing. Or a couple, maybe :
1. ATMK, Apple never announced officialy a date for the release of iLife’07. According to the rumors mill, the new suite is pretty tight to some Leopard’s key features. Hence the fact that nothing came out of Cupertino so far. Let’s wait for the WWDC next month.
2. the iPod has created what’s known as “the halo effect” : it attracted new people to the Mac platform. iTunes for Windows allowed PC users to enjoy the iPod experience, hence discover the Apple experience at large. Then people started to switch from the Wintel world to the Mac world.
3. the iPhone is using MacOS X Leopard, not Windows. According to Apple itself, it will sync with iTunes, for Mac and PC. Chances are pretty high that the Mac’ key apps such as Mail and iChat will also communicate either directly or thru the Sync app with the iPhone.
Now, provided that Apple is putting emphasis onto the enterprise market, there is a fair chance to see some cool stuff coming for Windows too – how about some Apple-made widgets (sorry, gadgets) aimed at synching your PC with an iPhone ?
4. about third-party apps for the iPhone, read this post on Slashdot :
“In an interview with the New York Times, Steve Jobs confirms reports that the recently-announced iPhone will not allow third party applications to be installed. According to Jobs, ‘These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them.’ In a similar vein, Jobs said in a MSNBC article that, ‘Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.’”
As with the 5G iPod, Apple will probably sell approved 3d-party apps for the iPhone thru its own channels. There is no better success for a software developper than being referenced at Apple.com and sold on iTunes…
5. The last thing. You wrote : ” Another possibility is spill-over effects from software-vendors learning to play on both sides of the fence and finally deciding to move to the much bigger and profitable market of Windows instead. “. Hey, wake up, Buddy ! Are you coming back from a 2-yrs trip on Planet Mars or what ? Haven’t you noticed the fact that every single major software editor is now releasing its new products for both Windows and MacOS ? The Windows software market is bigger than the Mac’s, but it full of really crap stuff.
HTH,
_Marc
I’m a little sick atm, so I’ll keep it short. In regards to point 4, I was talking about Apple-made-software, as the title would suggest. In regards to point 5, I was again talking about a software which is not cross-platform, iWork. But thanks for waking me up.
Finally, I have to stress that this is an opinion-piece about a futuristic scenario. Let’s see what June has to offer and I will be happy to publicly admit my mistakes then.
Thanks for sharing your opinion.
@ Vincent : to get a better understanding of Apple’s strategy, you may think of the iPhone as a MacTablet in 10 million pockets*. That’s quite a nice base to reach business users…
* Apple’ sales plan says 10 millions iPhone by the end of 2008.
So, Safari for Windows. Well I wasn’t exactly right, but not exactly wrong either
And they’re promoting application-development within Safari. Sneaky, sneaky.
(Vinnie is very proud of himself for a moment…)
Now someone who understands all this sofware-heisa, please write an imaginative post about where they think this is going.
Well predicted Vinnie, good job!
I believe the idea was to make sure Safari gets more street-cred web dev wise. Steve Jobs noted that Safari’s market share on the net was bigger than Apple’s market share in computers, so that meant that Safari has probably hit a ceiling. 5% is still a bit too low to guarantee that web apps are designed with Safari in mind.
and then there’s the “gateway phenomenon” too…
and then, there’s the Google phenomenon too: the Google search bar has been embedded into Safari for Windows. In other words, just as in Firefox, Apple is getting revenu for every search lead generated through Safari. It’s not at all about platform strategy or anything else: it’s about Apple cashing in a share of the Google ad pie.
Frankly, I would have assumed Steve Jobs was sort of less greedy than this. It happens seldom, but I have to admit that I’m disappointed by Steve Jobs this time.
Jeremy, every major browser (Safari, Firefox, Opera, and yes, even IE7) has an embedded Google search bar. Sure, they might get some additional users (my guess Safari adoption will be mainly with Mac users who happen to use Safari now and then), but I don’t believe that to be the major driver.
Sure, Apple probably makes more money out of a single search in Safari than a single sale at iTunes, but anyway.
Then again, if Mozilla foundation cashes in 50 million dollars a year from Google and their browser has 15% of the browser market share (vs Safari’s 5%), that would mean Apple would get at least 15 million dollars.
As Google is not the default search in IE7, I’m not going to estimate what kind of deal Microsoft might or might not have with Google and what kind of money we’re talking about.
John Gruber at Daring Fireball agrees with you, Jeremy, and puts the figure at 25 million dollars a year from GOogle, and forecasts 100 million with “moderate success” with the Windows version.
In order to keep the iPhone viable, they NEED to create Windows-based iPhone app development software. Why? Because there are tons of amazing developers and entrepreneurs out there and businesses that cannot currently write iPhone apps because they use Windows. Opening up the app development market to Windows users will invite in not only MORE apps, but as a result you will see a lot more higher-quality apps and iPhone users will have a lot more reasons to use their iPhones for everyday tasks. The iPhone is already changing our everyday lives; think of what will happen if the iPhone becomes as widespread as the home computer. I can already use my iPhone for many tasks I would normally do on my computer. If app development stays limited to the Mac OS, you won’t see people buying Macs to develop iPhone apps. But if development was open to Windows as well then every Joe with a computer can make an app. iPhone App development could even evolve into an easier process, just like web development has evolved into InfoPath and SharePoint. If the iPhone moves in this direction, there could be no stopping it.
Have you seen the Appstore wall? I don’t think there is any shortage of app-development for the iPhone at all, arguably developers are one of the core-audiences for Apple computers as well.
My post was more about getting business-users, who are often on Windows, to have more app-integration between their PCs and their mobile device.