
Joe Hewitt: On Middle Men - mqt
http://joehewitt.com/post/on-middle-men/
======
SwellJoe
I'm pleased to note that a lot of people have realized that taking part in the
iPhone (and other locked down mobile devices) ecosystem is sharecropping.
Obviously, the landowners have a strong desire to stick with the sharecropper
model...I've just never understood why _developers_ are voluntarily going
there, when there are so many other ways to spend ones time and effort that
don't involve begging Apple for scraps.

~~~
trixjo
please do tell. what are the "other ways"?

no other app market has the audience that Apple has

let's not even mention the Android marketplace -- it is still to nascent.

so what are the "other ways" please? do tell

~~~
SwellJoe
_what are the "other ways"?_

 _no other app market has the audience that Apple has_

So, I say, "I don't want to be a sharecropper", and you ask me where else you
can be a sharecropper that treats you better.

I'm not talking about app markets, at all. I'm talking about being a software
developer. As a software developer, you have damned near infinite options for
making a living. And a lot of those options provide more dignity, _and_ more
money, than being Apple's bitch.

The notion that selling iPhone apps is a "gold mine" for developers is a bit
like saying the lottery is a good investment strategy. Yes, some developers
make a lot of money from iPhone applications. Most do not. I suspect that
building products for the much wider general software market or the web market
would be a much more profitable path for your efforts (at least, that's been
where I've placed my bets, and where I plan to continue placing my bets in the
future).

~~~
ntoshev
The web market works, of course; the app store is just a specific distribution
channel that has its advantages over the web:

* everyone who needs to do something on their iPhone goes to search the app store even though a web app could serve their needs better

* users like the reviews and trust apple not to allow harmful apps in the store

* the app store provides an easy way to charge your users

~~~
SwellJoe
_the app store provides an easy way to charge your users_

My understanding of the process of selling iPhone apps is this:

1\. Pay $99 to become an "iPhone Developer"

2\. Build your application, taking care not to violate any of the known rules
Apple has put forth.

3\. Submit your application. Wait for a response. Sometimes for a very long
time.

4\. Either get notification that your app has been accepted, or receive a
terse note of rejection, that _might_ explain why it has been rejected. If the
former, celebrate, and maybe start making money...odds are, it'll make a few
bucks a day. If it's a knockout app without competition you could make a lot
of money (though iPhone apps tend to trend downward in revenue pretty
dramatically after an initial spike, so you have to be thinking of your next
app pretty quickly).

If you receive a rejection, however...the fun and excitement and "easy" times
continue:

5\. You study the rejection notice, the Apple guidelines, and random blog
posts on the Internet to try to figure out what you've done wrong in your
application. You make changes, and go back to step 3. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Your application may _never_ be made available in the App Store, it's up to
Apple.

Optional step 6 (assuming repeated, seemingly arbitrary, rejection): You blog
about your pain, and people share your woe and commiserate with you about
their own difficulties with the App Store process. Maybe, if you're a big name
developer or blogger, somebody from Apple takes another look at your app, and
things begin again at step 3. Maybe you get ignored.

And, of course, every time you release a new version or you build a new app,
you get the joy of doing it all again.

This process not only does _not_ seem "easy" to me, it seems like the kind of
tedious bureaucratic bullshit that I intentionally became an entrepreneur to
avoid. Hell, I've shaped my entire life around avoiding stuff like that.

 _everyone who needs to do something on their iPhone goes to search the app
store even though a web app could serve their needs better_

So what? You're jumping through hoops to reach one particular niche market,
when the world is wide and their are billions of people who _don't_ use iPhone
apps for everything. Developers being so damned eager to jump through those
hoops, generally in exchange for a pittance, has just made other companies
start trying to build their own fences around their own little patches of land
and start their own little app stores, so developers have to become
sharecroppers to reach those users. This is not a good thing. Apple is not
doing developers any favors with the App Store.

 _users like the reviews and trust apple not to allow harmful apps in the
store_

So what? User trust and loyalty can be earned in _many_ other ways. Provide a
forum, an open issue/support tracker, testimonials, a clear and generous
refund policy, etc. And, of course, web apps can't (generally) harm someone's
machine...so, there is no "harmful" web app stigma to worry about. If you're
taking someone's money in exchange for software or services, PayPal and Google
Checkout provide good assurances to buyers that you aren't going to defraud
them or misuse or expose their credit card details.

In short, the "advantages" you mention are all on the side of web apps, not
iPhone apps. The only real advantage to the iPhone App Store is that if you
want to reach iPhone users directly, it is the only way to do so. So, we
probably will eventually release a couple of iPhone applications...but they
will be mainly intended as marketing tools, and not expected to be a source of
revenue. And, I'll probably pay someone to deal with all the BS of getting the
app into the store, because I sure as heck don't want to deal with it.

Our WebKit-targeted theme, on the other hand, we worked on very early in the
life of the iPhone, and consider it an extremely important part of our
product. We update it regularly when new phones come out, to make sure it
always works well with any WebKit based phone browser.

------
arihelgason
_"Middle men exist to reduce the cost of getting a product from A to B"_

This isn't the whole story. Good middle men also add value in any number of
ways (editorialising, structuring relationships, adding trust).

Disintermediation isn't always the answer. Becoming a better middle man
sometimes is.

~~~
psranga
IMHO, all of the supposed advantages of a middleman can be provided by an
_optional_ (important word) neutral third party (cnet downloads.com virus free
downloads for example). I agree with the article, I see very little value in
middlemen.

------
mrshoe
I recently attended a talk by a WebKit developer employed by Apple. The topic
of the talk was advanced CSS techniques. The speaker demonstrated some
incredible capabilities that WebKit has added to CSS, including transition
animations, 2D and 3D positioning and transformation, and gradient generation
(to name a few). When he combined these techniques into a demo web site along
with the HTML5 video element, I was blown away.

Unfortunately, Joe is correct that _"Web technology is still relatively weak,
and improving slowly."_ On the iPhone (and, to a lesser extent, on the
desktop) there is no comparison between the quality of native apps and the
quality of web apps. Native apps still afford much more to the developer. Yet
the web stack has proven to be very developer and user friendly.
Unfortunately, it is crippled by the browsers (especially one browser in
particular...).

Somehow we need to accelerate the empowerment of the web stack. One way to do
this is to diminish the power of various "native" stacks. Ironically, Apple is
one of the companies leading the way in this regard. The latest version of
iTunes is almost entirely WebKit based. Mobile Safari on the iPhone can use
all those amazing CSS capabilities that other browsers can't yet, even on the
desktop.

In the end, I have to agree with Google's strategy: bet big on HTML5.
Eventually, all apps will be web apps (though hopefully they won't require a
native app -- the browser -- to run). I just don't know what to do in the
interim while the web stack is still crippled by the browsers.

~~~
bonaldi
"Eventually, all apps will be web apps"

I keep hearing this, especially from the Cappuccino guys, and it strikes me as
a bit of a stretch. For it to be true, HTML/JS/CSS would have to stretch
dramatically to accommodate all the functionality of existing OS frameworks,
except they'll also have to be platform independent. Even if this happens,
it'll be yet another layer on top of the current stacks, but will have to
perform as well as software written for the layer below.

It might be plausible, but I don't think it's a given. "The web" has barely
gotten around to doing roundrects easily, let alone have the abilities to
allow you to implement something like InDesign, Maya or Cubase using its
technologies.

"Some apps"? Sure. "Most apps"? I can even see that -- consumer apps and basic
business apps the web can do really well. But "all apps"? [citation required].

~~~
mrshoe
> _HTML/JS/CSS would have to stretch dramatically to accommodate all the
> functionality of existing OS frameworks_

Yes, that's my point, and I think a major point of the article. It's getting
there, but very very slowly. The main reason for that is the required
consensus of the various browser vendors. There is nothing inherent to the web
model (apps built with HTML/CSS/js and distributed by visiting web URLs) that
makes it impossible to do everything you can do with "native" UI framework X.

> _let alone have the abilities to allow you to implement something like
> InDesign, Maya or Cubase using its technologies._

The UIs for those apps could easily be implemented using web technologies. The
number crunching would require an extension to our current set of web
technologies, like Google's native client. JavaScript implementations have
come a _long way_ in recent years, but not that long. ;-)

Still, the point is not that all apps can currently be written using web
technologies. The point is that it's theoretically possible and that the world
is moving in that direction. Sure, there are barriers to overcome. So, let's
overcome those. It's not impossible. It's not even that difficult.

~~~
bonaldi
I'm not sure that InDesign's UI _could_ be done with current tools -- there's
a lot of hardcore typography and image manipulation going on there at levels
of precision that make pixel-perfect look slapdash.

Still, I take the point, but it still seems to me much more like something
that would be theoretically possible than anything that will actually come to
pass. As you say, to really make this happen, you have to stop limiting the
progress of HTML, and that means breaking out of the browsers.

But ... if you break out of the browsers, you fracture the platform, and that
means you lose the incentive to make these apps web apps in the first place.
If your HTML/JS/CSS stack isn't as platform and browser-agnostic as it can be,
ultimately you end up with a platform-specific way of writing apps that
competes with native apps, and that's a losing battle.

Putting that aside, I'm not sure there's case that all apps _should_ be
HTML/JS, either. We can do cool things with the web stack, but ultimately it's
designed and optimised for sending pages and forms back and forth. We put up
with that because there are a great many benefits in doing so, but there has
to be a reason to write our apps that way -- reasons that things like iTunes
and the Safari Web Inspector have, but lots of other desktop apps don't and
won't.

~~~
Wump
_If your HTML/JS/CSS stack isn't as platform and browser-agnostic as it can
be, ultimately you end up with a platform-specific way of writing apps that
competes with native apps_

You mean like browser-specific CSS? Or IE6 hacks? Or layout and rendering
inconsistencies?

Web apps are the future of mobile applications for the same reasons they're
the present of desktop applications. Ease of distribution. Ease of iteration.
The freedom to do what you want, how you want it, in a market that's guided by
users, not a big company acting as gatekeeper.

------
seregine
This criticism applies to Facebook as much as it does to Apple. Facebook apps,
though usually built with more web technologies, still live in a walled garden
and require permission to operate.

"We're at a critical juncture in the evolution of software."

That's been true for the last 20 years. The software ecosystem evolves to meet
users' needs; the walled gardens have their place and the free-for-all areas
have theirs.

~~~
frognibble
Hewitt's criticism does not apply directly to Facebook. Facebook does not act
as a gatekeeper. Facebook does not require approval or review before launch
and operation of an application.

~~~
mikebo
But it does rule the platform with an iron fist, and the rules and APIs
drastically change every 4-6 months. Ask Zynga, Slide or RockYou.

------
gabrielroth
_In short, the mobile web needs better tools, better standards, and better
browsers_

Agreed.

 _and it needs them fast, before the only technologies that matter are the
ones controlled by the gatekeepers._

This is what I don't understand. Why is there a time limit? Why wouldn't we
expect things to play out in mobile just as they did on the desktop, with web
apps moving from nonexistent to peripheral to ubiquitous over many years? Web
developers were able to work around the limitations of Internet Explorer --
not without pain and suffering, but well enough. So why wouldn't we expect
them to work around the limitations of mobile browsers?

------
lowdown
Hewitt is dead wrong on his definition of middle men. They are there to
facilitate and earn a profit. Nothing to do with lowering cost. They increase
cost. Period.

Frankly, I think he's being a bit of a whiner about the whole thing. There are
what, 100k apps in the store? If they weren't QCing it would be 1,000,000 and
the percentage of shit apps would be MUCH higher than it is now (and it is
through the roof right now).

~~~
jerf
If the middleman brings more value to the end-customer than he increases the
cost, then (s)he is a net win, and cutting the middleman out reduces the value
to the end customer.

Note how that doesn't contradict what you say, which is still literally true;
the question is whether your literal truth actually matters.

The Internet makes some of the old "easy" ways of being a middleman irrelevant
and open the field wide open in a lot of ways, but it will never make it
impossible for a middleman to bring more value to the customer than they cost.
It's just that competing with "customer goes direct to the source" just got a
lot harder.

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minalecs
unfortunately i think joe is underestimating the power of the carriers in this
one. Look at how Verizon cripples devices, and how expensive unlimited data
plans are. Native app that can work without connectivity are still a huge
advantage. If you look at the top selling apps, most can work without data.

------
known
Govt is the biggest _Middle Men_ between Tax Payers & Consumers.

