Apple has always treated third-party developers with suspicion. The developer website is only accessible by creating an account and agreeing to their license agreement. They churn through and deprecate APIs comparatively fast. They will quite happily steam-roller over third-party developers by adding competing features to the OS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashboard_%28software%29#Compar...
None of this is new, the only difference is that there's now a release bottleneck that requires Apple's approval, and there's a lot of developers new to the platform.
The thing is, this is part of Apple's culture for a reason. Steve is an obsessive control-freak when it comes to a great user experience, and third party developers are seen as a threat to that. Microsoft has always been a great company to deal with as a third-party developer - they value their ecosystem, put effort into free documentation and solid IDEs, and rely on outside developers for key applications. The trouble with this comparative openness is that you end up with 800 pieces of software written by different companies fighting it out on your desktop, leading to crashes and inconsistent UIs all over the place.
I think Apple is in danger of screwing up a great opportunity with the app store, but this way of operating is in their DNA and it won't be easy to change. Despite what the geek consensus might be, the record shows they've made a lot of money in the past whilst ignoring third-party developers.
> The trouble with this comparative openness is that you end up with 800 pieces of software written by different companies fighting it out on your desktop, leading to crashes and inconsistent UIs all over the place.
And that's a bad thing because? Who has the mainstream OS now with over 87% market-share? Even popular cross-platform applications that were first available for Macs (like Adobe Photoshop) are now more optimized for Windows.
Microsoft has always been more open ... you can install Windows on any hardware you want as long as it's compatible (and most hardware is, with the notable exception of ARM-processors).
The developer tools where a lot more competitive because Microsoft allowed competition from the likes of Borland. And the Windows API was free to use (as opposed to OS/2 for instance). And for end-users ... Microsoft has always been committed to backwards compatibility (at least for popular applications).
Microsoft can be called "evil" yes, because of their aggressive tactics regarding competition. But imagine what would Apple do in the same position ... and it's kind of ironic that many developers choosing openness went to Apple for that.
Apple makes money, yes, but they were on the edge of bankruptcy ... they should've learned a valuable lesson then (besides keeping Steve Jobs as the CEO).
"you can install Windows on any hardware you want as long as it's compatible"
Sorry, I had to laugh.
Part of the blame for Itanium losing the 64-bit bandwagon could be pointed to Microsoft, for not having Windows ready for it when it became available. Or for delaying the launch - it's silly to launch a processor without an OS to run it on.
Having Windows support for your hardware is paramount to any desktop computer company since the early 90's (with the notable exception of Apple). Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC (as in PReP) desktop systems are not dead because x86 systems were a better price/performance choice: they are dead because Microsoft pulled the plug on NT for them (and Linux was not ready to take its place at that time). That's also why all our computers are remarkably alike from the inside. It's not that Microsoft is open - it's that they have computer makers cornered.
Today I can get a non x86 computer and expect all my userland to work (with the possible exception of Flash, Skype and parts of Eclipse). I could not do that in the 90s.
The Itanium is not an expensive server chip because Intel cannot build an Atom-like processor with the Itanium ISA (heck - it must be easier than do it with the x86 ISA). It's an expensive server chip because it won't run Windows 7 and Office.
I see very little competition in the development tools in the Microsoft space these days. Tool makers know better - if they make something that competes with Visual Studio, Microsoft will come after them in the next release cycle and it is not worth the pain to fight them. That's why every non-Microsoft development tool around is built for a niche. Or is free, a case where Microsoft will not be able to go after you. That could be a reason for the free language explosion we are seeing.
And thanks. The Psystar imbroglio is a statement of how evil Apple can be about competition these days.
It even seems that after stopping attracting the best and brightest, they started attracting former Microsoft minions...
You seem to think I'm arguing that Apple's approach is better than Microsoft's. I'm not at all, just pointing out that there's internally-consistent reasons behind Apple's culture of preferring tightly-controlled, closed systems. The lesson learned from that brush with bankruptcy was that the cloned-hardware approach degraded the user experience.
Steve seems to think that the benefits of closed systems (standardised UI, fewer crashes) outweigh the costs (more expensive, less software). I don't have to agree to recognize that he's making a rational trade-off.
None of this is new, the only difference is that there's now a release bottleneck that requires Apple's approval, and there's a lot of developers new to the platform.
The thing is, this is part of Apple's culture for a reason. Steve is an obsessive control-freak when it comes to a great user experience, and third party developers are seen as a threat to that. Microsoft has always been a great company to deal with as a third-party developer - they value their ecosystem, put effort into free documentation and solid IDEs, and rely on outside developers for key applications. The trouble with this comparative openness is that you end up with 800 pieces of software written by different companies fighting it out on your desktop, leading to crashes and inconsistent UIs all over the place.
I think Apple is in danger of screwing up a great opportunity with the app store, but this way of operating is in their DNA and it won't be easy to change. Despite what the geek consensus might be, the record shows they've made a lot of money in the past whilst ignoring third-party developers.