This is the same Apple that plans for GateKeeper to check a certificate server for blacklisted apps and developers in OS X 10.8.
Imagine not even being in the App Store and your app's mainstream customers with default settings seeing a scary warning message because your certificate was accidentally blacklisted. Coming to the HN front page later this year..? :-)
Orienting your business around the ecosystem of a corporation with an itchy trigger finger is a tricky game of dice.
This isn't just an Apple problem. There's a disturbing trend here. All of the dominant internet companies exhibit this kind of nonsensical "evil" behavior: Google, eBay, Apple and Paypal, to name the most salient examples.
Way back when, Microsoft was openly painted by Apple (and the Apple cult followers) as being evil. Interestingly enough, Microsoft never sought to have this kind of a death grip on its users, at least not by force. And, I've never heard of MS killing-off someone's revenue stream like that. You buy their tools and develop for the platform. They don't have a say at all. That's the way it should be.
Somehow a united front needs to be organized and presented to these companies in order for them to understand that they are causing serious damage.
To say that, as entrepreneurs, businessmen and developers we don't want to see the tech landscape develop and evolve in this manner is probably an understatement.
I wonder if CNBC might be interested in doing a documentary on the damage to small businesses and entrepreneurs done by the likes of Google, Apple, eBay and Paypal? That could be an interesting angle.
The repeated comparison with Microsoft's "former" evil lacks perspective. Microsoft aimed higher and sought to pretty much own the entire ecosystem and everything in it. You don't need to kill of someone's revenue stream if you've taken said someone out of the equation entirely.
The painful difference is, where Microsoft actively aimed for the big game, leaving most smaller businesses to do as they please as long as they stayed small, the automated systems build to control rather than own the ecosystem (i.e. app stores) hurt everyone equally.
This leads to painful stories about big evil Apple/Google/eBay hurting the little guy. It sucks, it's a very worrying trend and I agree we should be pushing back.
But it's still nowhere near as "evil" as MS former dominance, when the options were a) build for Windows and get killed by MS if you become to big, or b)... Oh wait, there was no other option.
But it's still nowhere near as "evil" as
MS former dominance
This argument comes up a lot but I just don't see it.
In regards to the death of such companies like Netscape or Borland, you cannot put the blame on Microsoft's evilness. Sorry but you cannot. These companies completely fucked up their products. If they kept working and improving instead of fucking up their products, Borland would still sell developer tools and Netscape would still make serious money with their browser.
Also, take a look at Adobe. This company is not only big and old, but it thrived in a Microsoft-dominated world with products that directly competed with Microsoft's own products.
Now do a small exercise, take the effects of present-day Apple and scale that to a 90% market-share.
Half of the reason Netscape and Borland died was because of their own mistakes. The other half was that Microsoft had competing products and proceeded to crush them. If Microsoft had taken graphics editing more seriously by creating a Photoshop competitor bundled with Office or built Silverlight 5 years earlier than they did instead of bundling Flash into Windows, Adobe's story would have been very different.
On how many products can a single company work on? If Microsoft focused on a Photoshop clone, that focus would have been lost from somewhere else, just how they moved the engineers that worked on IExplorer to Silverlight. It's as simple as that.
Even if a company is one of the biggest and wealthiest in the world, development still takes time and resources. Which is why hypothetical questions like what would have happened if Microsoft built Silverlight earlier DO NOT make sense, simply because they didn't build Silverlight earlier and that's that.
Disregarding the fact that Microsoft already had a Flash competitor (ActiveX), Silverlight's technical advantages comes from the underlying platform, which is .NET and no matter how you look at it, if you're talking about current-day Silverlight, then you must include .NET into that equation.
On building Silverlight 5 years earlier, that would have been impossible, considering you're talking about year 2003, with .NET being initially released in 2002. So to make that decision 5 years earlier, then you have to shift the evolution of everything that led to it 5 years earlier. That means the release of .NET should have been in 1997, so development on it should have started somewhere in 1994, before the release of Windows 95.
You could then say that if only Microsoft invested more resources into .NET and Silverlight, then these projects would have been released faster. But by all indications Microsoft made .NET and the Avalon-related technologies (like WPF and Silverlight) their top priority, so they simply couldn't work faster.
"If Microsoft focused on a Photoshop clone, that focus would have been lost from somewhere else"
huh?
So all that time they were working on silverlight, there was no one working on xbox. or office. or ie. or windows vista/7/xp-patches. or sharepoint. or asp.net. or sql server. or iis. or c#. or linq. or ford sync tech. or metro. or windows phone 7.
Please...
had they wanted to get in to the photoshop realm, they would have.
Adobe's big cash cow is Photoshop. Photoshop users are traditionally Mac loyalists, I doubt many of them would have given any MS offering the time of day.
Photoshop users use Mac because it works the best for what they're doing. If they could have had the same solution vastly cheaper and 80-90% as good you think they'd have been willing to pay thousands more for that 10-20%?
Photoshop gives you much more than 20% over GIMP. Photoshop is light years ahead of anything else out there and only getting more so (see latest sneak of deblurring photos).
Yes, there seems to be some disconnect between Microsft killing off competition and said competition simply being worse. Not to say that there weren't smaller companies with good products that were pushed out by some intentional decisions on Microsoft's part, but the headline examples always rung a bit hollow for me.
People forget, because it's seen as "hip" to hate on it now, but when IE6 was released, it really was a better browser than the competition.
What killed Netscape was that version 3.0 of their server products were terrible. At the time I was working for a company that had spent millions on version 2. It was easier to jump platforms than to try to get 3 stable for us...
Dude, people don't hate IE6 because it's hip, we hate it because it has wasted hours and hours and hours of time for each and every one of us who design for the web, and the websites you use are worse as a result.
Maybe IE6 was better than the competition in 2001, but it was also terribly buggy and non-standards-compliant, encouraged developers to include Windows-only components that made it impossible for users to change browsers or even upgrade, and then wasn't upgraded for 5 years. Five years. And they did it that way not by accident or incompetence, but because they knew before anyone else that the web was a competitor, and they wanted to screw it up as much as possible.
Hate hate hate IE6 and be proud of it. Microsoft has a lot of karma to make up.
Yes, but from when IE4 came out (1997) until late 2004 when Firefox came out, IE was the undisputed best browser (yes I'm ignoring Opera as we always have). That was 7 very long years of getting people to upgrade to IE from NN4.
What? No. Borland was vastly superior to Visual Studio. Today Visual Studio is the best IDE in existence, but in the Borland days creating a GUI was much, much easier in Borland.
> Microsoft aimed higher and sought to pretty much own the entire ecosystem and everything in it.
They've wanted to own the ecosystem but not everything in it. In fact, there was a significant strategic tension between wanting to control the tools developers use to build apps and wanting to leave the app development space as open and accessible as possible.
You don't need a developer licence to write an app to run on Windows. Likewise, you don't need permission from Microsoft to sell that app to Windows users. You don't even need to be running Windows on your development machine. Those are three significant, meaningful ways that Microsoft's approach, even at its most hegemonic, has always been more open, accessible and inclusive than Apple's.
You do not need anything from Apple to write or sell apps for the Mac, either, and I do not think you ever needed that (early Macintosh, say before the phonebook edition of Inside Macintosh, may have been an exception, as the information you needed simply was not out there. You also would have needed a Mac to write the floppy disks that most software got distributed on (there was some distribution over the Internet using Kermit))
It is true that it is way easier to write programs using Apple's (free, at the moment) tools, and it sure helps to have access to a Mac, if alone for testing, but you do not _need_ either. In that, it is not that much different from Windows. You can write Windows (Win32 or .NET) tools on Unix, but I would not advise going that way.
> You do not need anything from Apple to write or sell apps for the Mac,
For now that remains true on OSX, but it's not true for iOS, which is what TFA is about, and as OSX imports more ideas from iOS I'm not entirely comfortable it will remain true.
However, and probably due to Apple, the new Windows 8 tablets (and the Metro UI for all forms of Windows 8) will only run applications from their new Windows Store.
So while they may not have before, Microsoft is certainly not immune from this trend.
Sure. That's another way to release the software if it works for you. The article talked about a software released via mac appstore. So obviously web was not an option for him for some reason.
I can imagine a situation where a 20 dev shop gets closed because of something like this and they can't make payroll. There are lot of people here basing their company on an App in the app store. I'd be terrified.
Great in theory, but there really isn't a good way to diversify if you're making apps. Yes there's Android, and some apps can make as much or more money on Android, but even if the app is making the same amount on both platforms, iOS kicking you out for no good reason could cut your income in half, which can put a company out of business almost as quickly as cutting off all of their money, if they've grown it based on what they believe to be a steady income stream.
Given the kind of draconian control apple has on its store, there is always a risk if you are part of the ecosystem. But earning half income is still better than none right? Besides now windows has app store too and a much bigger distribution. If you don't like Apple's terms and your other platforms are making enough money you always have an option of kissing goodbye to apple. My point is that diversification gives you options.
Both androind and Windows provide guidelines to port over your applications over. So I don't think this option exists only in practice.
I assume this may be a theme in the making.. I wonder if App Store like ecosystems have similar issues. I havnt heared of any in the android market, but im sure similar cases can be found.
Still, with android market, once your app has a reputation, you have a fair chance to distribute by yourself, as few devices lock down the side-loading capability.
Imagine not even being in the App Store and your app's mainstream customers with default settings seeing a scary warning message because your certificate was accidentally blacklisted. Coming to the HN front page later this year..? :-)
Orienting your business around the ecosystem of a corporation with an itchy trigger finger is a tricky game of dice.