Is Apple 'open enough' to rule the next decade of mobile?
For all the discussion of the importance of transparency and openness on the Web today, it's very telling that the world's fastest-growing mobile platform may also be the most proprietary.
Apple wins rave reviews (including from me) on its technology but certainly not for its commitment to sharing its innovations with the world...unless, of course, you fork over $299 and sign a two-year mobile service commitment.
Indeed, Apple has earned the dubious honor of being more closed than Microsoft.
And yet, as Marc Hedlund reveals over on the O'Reilly Radar, application growth for the iPhone dwarfs that of the former leader in the smartphone category, PalmOS:
If openness matters so much, why is Apple doing so well with its uber-proprietary iPhone, just as Microsoft dominates the desktop with proprietary Windows?
There are at least two answers. One is that while Apple's iPhone (like Microsoft's Windows) isn't open in the open-source sense, it is open in the sense that it's easy to create applications that run on it. The second reason is that there's a huge financial incentive to do so, given the momentum behind the platform.
For some, these reasons aren't good enough, such as Mozilla Chair Mitchell Baker:
Many of us participate in closed systems where the rules are set for us and we don't see them, certainly can't change them, and aren't permitted to "participate" in building the rules. This is true of very popular web services. For example, I "participate" in Flickr and Facebook, but within the system and rules that those organizations set up to meet their own goals. That's fine; there's no reason for those sites to change.
Mozilla is trying to build a layer of the Internet that's different, where "participation" extends to the very core of what we build.
With 40 percent of Mozilla's Firefox written by outside contributors, it's clear that an open platform works for Mozilla to build a better browser, which is why Mozilla continues to improve the ways in which developers can contribute to it. But it's equally clear that there are other ways to be "open to participation," ways that pay the rent for Apple, Microsoft, and huge ecosystems of commercial partners.
Is one platform approach better than another?
While it's clear that the world has room for both proprietary-but-open-enough and pureplay-open approaches to platform building, I favor the more open approach. The reason is that eventually, it appears proprietary approaches can collapse under their own weight.
Take Windows, for example. To maintain its growth, Microsoft has had to include more and more functionality in the operating system, stepping on the toes (or outright devouring the toes) of its erstwhile partners. (Interestingly, while discussing whether openness matters for Apple over Google Android, Slate describes Microsoft's Windows approach as open.)
Eventually, Windows grew to such heft that the market, including Microsoft partners, started looking for open alternatives, causing then Microsoft chairman Bill Gates to dub Linux Microsoft's "most potent operating system competitor." The "good enough" operating system that performed certain tasks much more efficiently and powerfully than Windows has now grown to seriously threaten Microsoft in a range of applications and markets.
Eventually, even Microsoft's desktop dominance may be threatened by Linux as new classes of easy-to-use, cost-effective devices like Netbooks arise.
Back to Apple. Today, Apple's iPhone seems set to rule the world because it enables a huge community of application developers to reach a paying audience. Tomorrow, however, Google (Android/Linux), Nokia (Symbian, Linux), Palm (WebOS/Linux), and even Microsoft (Windows Mobile) threaten its cozy corralling of the mobile market.
Microsoft has made it clear that it's possible to build a massive business with an "open enough" approach to platform development. The question is, can Microsoft (and Apple) maintain that without truly opening up?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
It might be worth renaming the title of the blog to, "Why I hate Microsoft this time." It would be more honest and realistic.
@Seaspray0: I mostly disagree. I think it's important to see just how fast iPhone OS has grown against Palm OS, back in its hey day. In fact, if I wanted to be absolutely fair to Palm, I would have talked about how weak its new OS has been, despite its open source approach. But I wrote about that the other day - perhaps you missed it?
"To maintain its growth, Microsoft has had to include more and more functionality in the operating system, stepping on the toes (or outright devouring the toes) of its erstwhile partners."
"Eventually, Windows grew to such heft that the market, including Microsoft partners, started looking for open alternatives, causing then Microsoft chairman Bill Gates to dub Linux Microsoft's "most potent operating system competitor." The "good enough" operating system that performed certain tasks much more efficiently and powerfully than Windows has now grown to seriously threaten Microsoft in a range of applications and markets."
"Microsoft has made it clear that it's possible to build a massive business with an "open enough" approach to platform development. "
Yes, I would rather say you did spend more time focusing on Windows and Microsoft than you did on Apple or the iPhone. The anti-MSFT slant your blog post takes is rather apparent to the point of making a person wonder if you only tossed in references to Apple as an afterthought.
Your previous blog posts have made it very apparent you do not like Microsoft- that's fine. I wish you wouldn't try to pretend that you're impartial or unbiased though. It just isn't very honest and discredits you as a journalist in my opinion.
Also, I used all manner of PDAs back in the day and then smart phones. To date none have been as oriented to the consumer as the iPhone. WinMo, BB, and the others are often a chore to use for even some tech people. The iPhone is "the smart phone for the rest of us". People used to ask why I always had a business phone then I got the iPhone and it was the same...until I let them play with it. They are iPhone users all now.
The problem with having so many apps is that the noise to signal ratio is very high. The iTunes Apps Store makes it very hard to actually navigate through that mess to find the usable content or offers.
How many are flashlights and tip calculators?
The problem with having so many apps is that the noise to signal ratio is very high. The iTunes Apps Store makes it very hard to actually navigate through that mess to find the usable content or offers."
You are certainly correct about that.
Quote: One is that while Apple's iPhone (like Microsoft's Windows) isn't open in the open-source sense, it is open in the sense that it's easy to create applications that run on it. The second reason is that there's a huge financial incentive to do so, given the momentum behind the platform."
And there isn't any incentive for third party developers who write hundreds of thousands of applications for Windows? Look at Adobe systems, Roxio, VMWare, Intuit, Quark, AutoDesk, Corel, even Mozilla themselves, Symantec, Oracle, Real, Apple. They all write applications for Windows and benefit tremendously from the Windows platform's ubiquity. So I find it unbelievable you would actually sit their around your Mac and spew such non-sense Matt. Please, I command you stop you abusive language towards Microsoft and if you don't have anything sensible to post on CNET, go outside and get some well needed fresh air.
Quote: Eventually, even Microsoft's desktop dominance may be threatened by Linux as new classes of easy-to-use, cost-effective devices like Netbooks arise.
The last time I checked, Windows dominates Netbooks. Did you not get the message Matt?
I believe the intent was to show that there's greater incentive to develop for the iPhone than there is for Windows *Mobile*. the App Store eases revenue collection for developers, and the explosion of the handset over Windows Mobile has created a comparatively larger audience for iPhone developers.
You command him to stop? What r u? Ruler of the world??
Apple should be more afraid of Android actually
I've owned several Windows Mobile devices, and while they (generally) work, the usability factor has clearly never been a focus.
It will work with capacitive screens.
The problem with most people's thinking here is the fact they ignore Apple using and creating open standards. OpenCL was Apple's creation, and now it's free and an open standard. Webkit is going to make every competitor lost market share. It's in Safari, Chrome and quite a few other browers and applications.
And lastly, Apple's tools for the creation of applications is so much easier to use than what's available for any other mobile platform that they will continue to dominate the applications world for phones as well, simply because it's so much easier to write apps for the OS that already dominates. Inertia against going elsewhere will only grow over time. And let's not even get into the graphics subsystem and other technologies that have no peer on other phones. When the iPhone begins to multitask (a year from now?) it's game over for the competition.
Microsoft has patents for multitouch as well.
Surface for example which was in development before the iPhone.
check your facts WinMo is not compatible with capacitive screens
Consumers don't care about "open".. or even options.. If they did, Windows would not be as popular for sure.
Computers are a consumer market now.. not as driven by corporate policies as it once was.
Consumers.. especially the young and educated.. are choosing Macs (and iPod+iPhone).
I'd say the increase in Apple's computer market share is going to skyrocket in a year or two.. when those college grads have more money to buy what they want (IF they can get a job).
Apple does not appear to be interested in getting into the low-end of the mobile handset market (where margins are much slimmer). They aren't trying to dominate Microsoft in the desktop PC world (which is shrinking in percentage, not growing).
The main technology wars in the next 10-20 years will not be waged on the desktop PC front anyhow. This war is for mobile devices. In many countries already (some of them highly advanced like Japan), the importance of desktop computing is far less than what your phone can do.
Your "fork over $299 and sign a two-year mobile service commitment" comment is a straw-man argument. Other mobile carriers have the same contract commitment and frequently subsidize their smartphones. Heck, if I want to enjoy the fruits of the labor of the Google Android team, don't I have to make a similar commitment?
or MS does with windows
it's just not happening there's too many established players and competition
{which is good for us customers}
but it's safe to say that Apple re-ignited the smartphone market
much like how the Macintosh re-ignited the desktop computer market
as far as open and closed goes
hardly any customer cares about things like that
wat they want is a product that works well and does the functions it's intended to do
This is backwards: a computer should fulfill it's owners needs first. But this is Apple's business model and it's only way to make money. It can get away with this by having superior hardware and a superior user experience - for the moment. The fact is, before the iPhone, smart phones sucked completely, they failed on all fronts: crummy hardware, lousy software, AND the cell phone companies ALL acted like Apple and exercised way too much control over the platform. As long as users lose in these ways and are frustrated, there will be a tremendous attraction for more open platforms such as the Pre and Android. Frankly my money is on Android since it's already so close to the iPhone in abilities, the hardware is catching up and will be far more varied, and it will be on more carriers. And Android doesn't need 50,000 apps: it just needs the thousand or so that are actually useful, which it pretty much already has.
One of the big factors that it doesn't take into account is the massive increase in the number of people with the technical knowledge to develop apps. 10 years ago, development was very much done by the uber-geek. These days, there are many people who, whilst not techies as such, have enough basic knowledge to cobble together a few lines of code.
Then, as stig7k says, there is a different level of complexity to these apps. I would imagine - tho i admit i say this without any concrete proof to back it up - that the majority of apps developed for the PalmOS in its early days were developed by companies who were developing for commercial reasons and had a great deal invested in each app. They had to be solid maintable pieces of code with clear commerical value. In contrast, many apps developed for the iPhone are effectively throw-away toys that people use for a quick giggle and then on to the next one. I am a little reluctant to use the phrase but "quantity vs quality" springs to mind
Then there is also the number of handsets/devices involved. The iPhone has been a massive success in terms of units sold and with an increased number of handsets out there, that means more people with access to one and who have an incentive to develop for them. Obviously this is part of the overall success of the iPhone but I think without taking it into account, the stats regarding the number of apps available are a little meaningless.
Don't get me wrong, Apple have clearly changed the game in the way apps are developed and distributed with their app store and they deserve props for that. But this comparison implies that the Apple app store is the only factor involved in this change whereas i believe it was something that was already happening for a variety of reasons and Apple have simply moved it up a level
Incidentally Matt, you mention in one of the comments about how weak Palm's WebOS has been. Clearly I missed this article as well and flicking back through your previous posts, I cannot seem to find it. Any chance you could post a link?
The difference is not the size of the talent pool; it's the quality of the toolkit. Foundation and UIKit are fantastic frameworks that hide a great deal of complexity; the quintet of Xcode, Interface Builder, Instruments, and the iPhone Simulator offer a development experience as good as some of the best desktop toolsets.
What I remember of my dalliance in Palm development was exactly the opposite. Palm OS was a world of raw function calls and opaque handles. You couldn't even keep an ordinary pointer around; you had to keep a memory handle, and lock it when you needed to actually access the memory, so that the memory manager could reorganize RAM as needed. The development "environment" was Notepad and a command-line compiler; I don't think I ever figured out the debugger.
Frankly, what's happening with the App Store is that Apple has lowered almost every barrier to entering the market. It doesn't cost thousands of dollars or take a friend who's a golf buddy of some carrier executive to get distributed on the iPhone; all it requires is a hundred bucks and a bank account. It doesn't take five thousand lines of code to display a list on screen; it takes a few dozen. It doesn't take knowledge of a complex, arcane toolchain to get your code built into a binary, onto a device, and debuggable; it takes a few clicks.
This leads to a flood of apps, and yes, a lot of them are crap. But it also means that a real quality app can be written by a very small team. Tweetie?an Apple Design Award winner?is, as far as I can tell, a one-man effort, and Twitterrific is widely known to be one developer with a team of designers (who spend most of their time designing icons on contract). Cultured Code has less than a dozen people supporting both Mac and iPhone versions, and they won their own ADA. I know the guy who wrote the first versions of AIM for the iPhone. A two-man team (a designer and a programmer) developed the sophisticated Basecamp client Outpost. And my own apps are the product of a one-man shop; one of them has been a fairly consistent hit.
If you want to know why the iPhone's taken off like it has, I really think that's the reason. It is so easy and cheap for even a small team to produce something decent that there's no good reason not to try.
Do people choose their TV on the basis of how easy it is to hack it? Or their toaster? Or whether they're able to modify the OS used by their car's antilock brakes?
People choose their phone on the basis of its features, usability, app availability, price, service plan and other such issues. 'Openness' doesn't even enter into the equation.
There are over 50,000 apps (yes, many of them are junk, but there are still far more good apps than the total number on Pre or Android). The iPhone has gotten consistently positive reviews for usability. The price is very competitive. Thus, it's a big winner.
You also make the mistake of presenting 'open' as an advantage in itself. If that were the case, every open source piece of software would be better than every proprietary piece of software - which clearly isn't the case. In fact, there are very few (if any) examples of where a proprietary piece of software is better than its proprietary counterpart. (In fact, I would argue that even the best open source software packages are not as good as their proprietary counterparts, but let's be generous and say they're as good). Open doesn't magically lead to better software.
Android will displace iPhone if it provides significant advantages in any of the criteria above. It will never displace the iPhone merely by being more open.
In case you didn't notice Apple is a business just like Microsoft, Palm and Blackberry. Any of these companies would be complete idiots to share their innovations with the competition unless it was their intention to NOT succeed. How can you NOT see that? Boy am I glad Apple doesn't listen to all of the "experts" who write articles for a living.
No company should be forced to share its innovations with the competition.
That, along with all the features they wished to pack in, made the code heavy. Throw in outside vendors, creating programs, and its amazing that Windows works as well as it does (and with XP and the latest iteration of Vista, its not a bad system really)
Put that on a light=powered platform, one where with people on the go, they want it to work now - the system falls apart.
Which is why, despite the ultra closed system Apple has, things work better on a platform than open source. This is why - Apple only has to create an OS that works with its hardware. No extra code for processors you are not running, drivers for accessories you don't have - just different speeds for the same basic architecture. They also provided SDKs, giving developers entry knowledge of the platform - much better than what even game systems do. Those developers don't need to break down the code of the system before they can start designing.
In the computer realm, when Apple ran their own proprietary hardware, you paid a premium because it was all custom built. Apple had to pass the direct cost to you, the consumer. Today, especially with the iPhone, the processor is an industry standard. And, you still pay for that premium hardware, but you pay ATT in installments, and Apple gets that money back in the entry handset subsidy. They get the hardware and software cut, instead of MS, which only gets a licensing fee from the hardware maker. In that realm, MS has less room for R&D costs because they make less, but have to deal with more hardware variations. WHich is probably why rumors persist about a Zune phone.....
- by timlayton July 1, 2009 7:37 PM PDT
- Microsoft and windows mobile is clearly more open that the iphone and apple. Well, everyone is more open than apple. This is sort of interesting from multiple perspectives. More importantly we talk about the closed nature of apple and the iphone, but we really don't know what that means in contrast to such compelling branding and marketing. I tend to think there is enough room for everyone in the market. I think we will continue to see plenty of windows mobile and RIM as we have and while the market will move and contract, there is enough room for the quality producers such as microsoft, RIM, google, etc.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(40 Comments)