A lot of hype around Palm and Pre mobile phone this week. Hmmmm, what’s the reality check? I was one of the earliest Apple evangelists when the company came out with the Apple II and the Mac. Back in the day I sold personal computers to help pay my way through college and based on the graphic interface and more “human” approach to interacting with a machine I became an Apple fan.
In my first job after college, in fact, I dragged my Mac to work and plugged it in, refusing to learn MS-DOS. But eventually in the business world Microsoft won. Applications for business were based on MS-DOS. Not Apple. MS-DOS was a platform. Third-party software developers made it into a global empire valued at hundreds of billions of $.
By the time 1995 rolled around and Microsoft came out with Windows 95 the eye candy advantage that Apple had was gone. Third party apps built on it and propelled Microsoft to the fore. I stopped being an Apple fan and started liking Windows and the plethora of apps available for a fraction of the price for a Windows PC.
Apple withered and fizzled like an open can of Pepsi.
I don’t know if you read Bill Gate’s book ‘The Road Ahead’ (way back in 1990s) but he talked about “virtuous cycles” that build companies. Positive swirls around a product. I guess the hippies in Cupertino at Apple must have read it since by the early 2000s the iPod popped out like Angelie Jolie emerging from Phyllis Diller. Somehow the gene pool that gave the world the Performa now had it right, again.
Maybe it was the return of Steve Jobs after his monk-like wanderings into NEXTville, which ended with Apple buying NeXT, his new PC company.
iPod gave Apple back a platform weapon, iTunes. Distribution. Ubiquity. The step from iPod to iPhone was short as who wanted to own a clamshell cell phone when a touch screen music and web player was available?
Mobile is not a desktop metaphor. It is what’s known in Latin as “tabula rasa,” or clean slate. What’s important on mobile isn’t the same as a desktop PC. Mobile is based on new apps, social and mobile by design (not afterthought). The mobile experience is staccato, Morse code-like bursts of communication. Texting. Gaming. Sharing. Listening. Watching. (And soon, Buying).
Today, iPhone is the world’s largest mobile computing platform with over 1 billion app downloads. Some 50,000 apps are reportedly available on the iPhone platform. Rivals are way behind: Information on Blackberry apps and its downloads are not readily available. Palm’s new Pre has about a dozen apps available and news reported about 150,000 downloads its first day (phone came out June 8, 2009).
Google is also getting into the mobile hardware effort by pushing out its Android mobile software to over a dozen handset makers.
The real battle is in third-party apps and who has the biggest ecosystem for developers to build on. Other contenders will emerge: Google, Facebook, Twitter. But they are all hopelessly late to the battle. Palm Pre may make it easier by using Web programming to hasten dev for its app store, but if a tree falls in the forest and no termite sees it…
The war will be fought by developers and won by developers — they are the ones that will make or break the computing platforms (Web, mobile, desktop). Whoever makes more money off of any platform will create the virtuous circle that wins. So far it’s Apple. By a 1 billion download margin. But, as mobile becomes the main computing/web/commerce/communication platform, the next 10 years will be more telling than the last 10.