I've rarely been so happy to be wrong as I was yesterday when I heard that Apple had relaxed some of the restrictions it puts on third party software apps for iOS. In case you somehow missed the news, iPhone and iPad apps can now be written in third party languages like Flash and Java. Apple also changed rules that would have made it difficult for outside advertising systems like Google's AdMob to insert ads in iOS apps.
I'd predicted a couple of months ago that Apple probably wouldn't give in on those terms, so it was a surprise -- but a very pleasant one, for a couple of reasons. First, and most important, I think it's good for app developers. The more ways they have to create apps, the more easily they can do business. But speaking as someone who's working on a startup, I was also personally pleased. We're doing a lot of development work in Java, and I'd been worried about the rework if we decided we needed a native client on iOS. Now the problem's solved (or at least it should be by the time we ship).
Although Flash and Java are getting all the attention in the press coverage, Apple's decision also has a huge effect on some smaller companies making development tools. For example, the folks at Runtime Revolution, who make one of my favorite prototyping tools, announced instantly that they'd be supporting iOS (link). And I'll be interested to see if the StyleTap Palm OS emulator will now be able to run on Apple devices that haven't been jailbroken.
This leaves us with the question of why Apple changed its policy. The Wall Street Journal speculated that Apple might have been trying to forestall legal action by the US government (link). The New York Times said it was a competitive response to Android's increasing momentum (link).
I wonder if Apple wasn't also influenced by the Library of Congress' recent ruling that phone companies can't use copyright law to prevent jailbreaking of phones (jailbreaking in this context permits a device to run applications that weren't approved by the manufacturer). Although jailbreaking is rare on iOS today, with the ruling companies were free to start promoting it. Apple may have felt that it was better to loosen up the rules of the App Store, rather than risk a lot of customers bypassing the store entirely.
They're all plausible explanations, and there's no reason why they couldn't all be correct. But I hope there's something deeper going on. As I've written before, when a company reaches a certain level of success, many of the business practices that were foundational to its growth can turn into liabilities. It's kind of like watching a kid grow up -- behavior that's understandable in a 10-year-old ("You got in a fight with Johnny? I'll get the Neosporin.") becomes antisocial in an adult ("You got in a fight with Johnny? You're under arrest.")
Apple has definitely reached that transition point. The aggressive business tactics that were acceptable for scrappy underdog Apple look like bullying and arrogance in industry leader Apple. Companies usually stumble on this transition, because their image of themselves doesn't change to match their altered role. When Microsoft hit it at the end of the 1990s, it responded with denial, aggressiveness, and defiance. The result was years of incredibly distracting litigation. The company has never been the same since.
Has Apple learned from Microsoft's lesson? Understanding Apple's internal decision-making is only slightly easier than understanding North Korea's, so we probably won't know for sure until years from now when somebody retires and writes a memoir. But I hope, for the sake of everyone in the Apple ecosystem, that this is the start of a kinder, gentler Apple.
Assuming it is, here are a few guidelines on how Apple the Leader should behave:
Aim to cripple, not kill. The old Apple routinely reached for the nuclear weapons when threatened by an outside firm. (Remember Power Computing? link) That was OK when Apple's own survival was at risk, but it's bad form for a company that's too big to fail. Instead, your goal is to damage your competitors to the point where they can't threaten your survival, but are still somewhat viable. Remember, dying competitors file antitrust suits; weak competitors are just whiners.
If you can't think of something nice to say about someone, lie. Apple has thrived on the drama of competition against the evil overlord (go rewatch the "1984" commercial if you want to understand how deeply this is a part of Apple's psyche). This confrontational style has seeped into public communications ranging from Apple's Mac vs. PC commercials to Apple's bitter statements about Adobe a couple of months ago. That all has to stop (and, interestingly, the Mac vs. PC ads already did). For a huge company like Apple, beating up on competitors makes you look like an arrogant bully. Repeat after me: "They're an impressive company, and we respect their accomplishments." It'll feel gross for a while, but you'll get used to it.
Pick your fights. Let go of issues that don't truly threaten your survival. Flash is a perfect example -- although in theory it's threatening, in practice Adobe has shown very little ability to turn it into a major cross-platform app environment. In fact, the whole Flash/Air thing was fading into obscurity until Apple gave it a big boost of publicity by attacking it. Hey, Apple -- you helped old, bureaucratic Adobe position itself as the spunky competitor against your Microsoftian monolith. Was that what you wanted?
The right way to contain the threat from platforms like Flash is to make sure Apple's own platform continues to innovate rapidly, and take better care of developers than anyone else.
Listen carefully. Because your instincts are tuned to the old rebel Apple, you're likely to mis-position yourself frequently while you learn the new rules. Admit to yourself that you have a problem, and manage it proactively. In the era of the Internet, there's no excuse for being blindsided by an issue. Right now you're putting out fires after they become obvious. If you listen carefully, you can respond to an issue before the firestorm builds up.
Occasionally admit you're wrong. People love a powerful person who's willing to admit being wrong. It makes you look humble. The same thing applies to companies. When you realize you need to back down on an issue, don't try to hide the fact. Tell people you listened to them and decided you were wrong. You got halfway there in the statement about the App Store changes: "We have listened to our developers and taken much of their feedback to heart." You should lose the phrase "much of" because it reads as a cheap shot; it implies that some of the things developers said were not worth paying attention to. And what I don't hear yet is the second most difficult three-word phrase to say in the English language: "We were wrong."
It's possible to overdo this sort of thing, of course. You shouldn't be backing down in public more than about twice a year, or you'll look indecisive. Between the store and the iPhone antenna thing, you've now used your quota for 2010. So keep your nose clean for the rest of the year.
Stay on offense. The key to the long-term survival of Apple is innovation and creating new product categories. Once you've stopped thrashing over distractions like antennas and store terms (not to mention federal lawsuits), you can focus more time on creating the next generation iPad, and developing new category products like Apple TV. Those are the things that really matter for your future. The more time you spend on them, the better Apple's prospects. By letting go of your underdog baggage, you give yourself the freedom to make those future products great.
Why did Apple give in?
And now for something completely different
I wanted to let you know that I'm working on a startup.
It's focused on an area that I'm passionate about, information management. We think we can do something that will make a big improvement in the lives of people on the go who are overwhelmed by the flow of information through their lives, especially in business. I'm teamed up with two excellent software engineers I knew from Apple. Between us, we have a huge base of experience in both big tech companies and startups, and I feel very excited about what we're developing.
The company is in the early stages. We've already started development, and the first version of the product is about halfway done. We're raising a bit of angel funding to bring the product to market. If you're familiar with the fundraising process, you know it involves a ton of networking. In that spirit, if you're interested in what we're doing and want to talk about it, please contact me at the address here.
Between the startup work and some consulting I'm still doing to cover expenses, there isn't much time available for writing on the weblog. There are a lot of things I want to write about, and I'll try to do some posts as time permits. But in the meantime, I apologize for going quiet, and I hope that when the product goes live you'll agree that the wait was worthwhile.
What I would have told the BBC about the Apple iPhone antenna, if they'd actually wanted to hear it
I got an email this morning from BBC World Service radio, asking if I'd like to participate in a debate to "discuss whether the Apple bandwagon is grinding to a halt" in the wake of the iPhone antenna problem. I said sure, and they asked a couple of questions about my views.
Unfortunately, when they saw my reply, they decided that my opinions were too similar to those of Computerworld columnist Mitch Wagner (link), who was also appearing on the program. It wouldn't lead to a good debate. They were very polite about it, and there are no hard feelings on my part.
(By the way, Mitch pointed out the most interesting line I've seen so far on the antenna issue -- Microsoft COO Kevin Turner compared the iPhone 4 to Windows Vista. "It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I'm okay with that." (link) That single sentence summarizes so much of what's wrong with Microsoft today: grasping at straws, in denial, not focused on what they must do to win, and a tin ear to what their comments sound like in public. The scariest thing is, I think they might actually believe the stuff they say.)
Anyway, back to Apple. I thought it would be good to share my thoughts that were too boring for the BBC. If they'd put me on the air, it would have gone something like this:
Q. On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad is this for Apple?
A. About a 1.5, with 1 being utterly meaningless in the long term. Unless there is some huge, hidden problem that Apple still isn't telling us about, the story is now over.
Q. One newspaper headline here goes 'Apple has lost its touch.' Is that fair?
A. It goes beyond unfair, it's utterly ludicrous. Apple just shipped the iPad, a major new category device, and it's selling far better than most people (including me) expected. For comparison, the Apple Macintosh, which we all cite as a huge success today, sold about 70,000 units in its first hundred days of availability (link). The iPad sold 70,000 units in the first four hours (link).
Most companies would kill to lose their touch that way.
If you want to look at a company that has lost its touch, check out BP. Or Toyota. Or Dell, which allegedly shipped twelve million computers that it knew were destined to fail (link). But even that sort of huge mistake isn't usually enough to kill a company. Remember when Intel knowingly shipped millions of Pentium processors that couldn't do math properly (link)? No, you don't remember? I rest my case.
If you want to know what Apple would look like if it lost its way, go back in time and look at the company in about 1997.
But Apple today? They made a mistake, and they handled it poorly. Hopefully they've learned from it. Giving everyone a free case is a reasonable solution. The cost of the cases is less than the cost of the accumulated bad PR (not to mention the cost of the class action lawsuits, which were the next step).
The average customer pays almost no attention to this sort of inside-the-beltway news. A company has to screw up repeatedly over a long period of time, or do something flagrant like killing people, in order to really damage its image. As long as there isn't any other big problem hidden in Apple's products, I think this story will be forgotten in a few months.
That's not to say everything is going great for Apple...
-Google Android is gaining momentum.
-Many mobile developers would love to have a better alternative to the App Store.
-Various governments might decide its walled garden approach to computing violates the law.
-At some point, I still believe the web is going to make proprietary platforms like Apple's less relevant.
-Apple is getting so big that I wonder how long it can continue to grow at the same rate.
And maybe most importantly, Apple is gradually learning that the rules of behavior for a successful industry leader are different than the rules for a scrappy upstart. Aggressiveness that's cute in a five-year-old kid will get a 25-year-old football player arrested.
Compounding Apple's challenge, its very effective marketing and design has set a higher standard for its products than the one applied to most other companies. Apple needs to learn that standing in the spotlight shows off your scars as well as your beauty marks.
One step in that process if for Apple to be humbler and more open. I think that's a lesson they started to learn this week.
(PS: I listened to BBC World's coverage of the iPhone this evening (link). One report called the antenna "the biggest PR disaster in Apple's history," which shows that BBC reporters have very short memories. As for what Mitch said, yeah it would have been a boring debate.)
Apple, Adobe, and Openness: Let's Get Real
There's a huge debate online about who's "right" between Apple and Adobe in the dispute over allowing Flash on the iPhone. Both companies portray their actions as protection of users and developers, but in reality what they're both protecting is their profits. There's nothing wrong with doing that -- it's what companies are supposed to do. But the only truly innocent victims in this dispute are the people trapped between Adobe and Apple.
Why Apple really doesn't want Flash on iPhone
Steve Jobs outlined his case against Flash in a recent open letter. His arguments boiled down to this:
Flash is proprietary.
H.264 video is better than Flash video.
There are lots of games on iPhone, so you won't miss the Flash ones.
Flash is insecure.
Flash makes Macs crash.
Flash is slow and reduces battery life.
Flash doesn't work well with touchscreen technology.
As an independent development layer, Flash reduces Apple's ability to innovate.
I'm not going to evaluate each of those claims; others have done a good job of that already. But none of Jobs' points except the last one explains all of Apple's actions. Apple has consistently banned not just Flash but almost all independent platforms, including Java, QT, and Palm OS emulators. One of the most poignant examples I've run across recently is Runtime Revolution, which is basically Hypercard brought into the modern era. It's a nifty tool for making prototypes and interactive media products, and its creator had been heavily committed to iPhone as a development target, encouraged by Steve Jobs' public statement that a third party developer could create a Hypercard-like product for iPhone. But Runtime Revolution's CEO killed the iPhone project last week because Apple won't allow the product to run; his story is posted here (link).
The bottom line: Apple just doesn't like other platforms.
I think Apple is sincere when it says it views these platforms as a potential barrier to innovation. But I don't think that's the whole story. Independent platforms also make it easy for a successful developer to port its software to other platforms, like Android or Symbian. This cross-platform porting is something that Apple fears because it's what allowed Windows to catch up with Macintosh.
Here's a list of some major PC software products. Do you know what they all have in common?
Photoshop
Word
Myst
Excel
FileMaker
PostScript
PowerPoint
Illustrator
The answer: They were first successful on Apple systems, and only later took off in the PC world.
I was working at Apple when this process happened, and I can tell you that it was searing. Apple had invested countless hours and dollars marketing those products as prominent reasons to buy Macs, and then we saw that investment turned against us when the apps were made available on Windows.
Do you think Steve Jobs has forgotten that experience? Look how he started the open letter on Flash:
"Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe's founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart."
Can you hear the resentment? It reminds me of Bill Cosby quoting his dad: "I brought you into this world, and I can take you out." I think some of the key folks at Apple remember being "betrayed" by "their" developers, and they are determined never to leave themselves vulnerable to that again. I believe it's Apple's policy to keep iPhone and iPad developers as closely tied to the platform as possible, and to make it as hard as possible for them to move their products elsewhere. I think that's the core reason why Apple won't permit Flash, or any other third party platform, to run on iPhone.
If I were still working at Apple, I would probably do the same thing. That's not to say I like the policy, because it restricts customer choice and developer flexibility. But I understand the business logic behind it, and the depth of feeling Apple folks have on this issue. To Apple this isn't just about innovation, it's about business survival.
I just wish Apple had been more specific about what was allowed and not allowed on its platform. At times the rules seem very arbitrary. For example, Runtime Revolution is banned from iPhone, but a game creation environment called Game Salad says it is allowed (link). The company claims Apple privately promised that it could continue to run, but won't say what it did to get Apple's permission. Runtime Revolution thought it was following the rules too. A platform vendor is responsible for articulating exactly what developers will and will not be permitted to do, before they invest time and money. Apple was at best sloppy about delivering that information, and at worst it changed the rules in the middle of the game.
Adobe's Flash agenda
So we have Apple trying to keep developers on the farm, barefoot and pregnant. Does that make Adobe the liberator, throwing open the gates and setting developers free? Maybe, but only to the extent that it serves Adobe's own interests.
If you want to understand Adobe's agenda for Flash, you have to look back to 2006, when Adobe bought Macromedia. Just after the acquisition, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen gave a very interesting interview in which he discussed Adobe's plans for Flash and related technologies (link):
Buying Flash "enables us to create an 'engagement platform.' Think of it as a layer or a vehicle in which anybody can present information that could be engaged with in an interactive, compelling, reliable, relatively secure way -- across all kinds of devices, all kinds of operating systems....If we execute appropriately we will be the engagement platform, or the layer, on top of anything that has an LCD display, any computing device -- everything from a refrigerator to an automobile to a video game to a computer to a mobile phone."
In other words, Flash becomes the developer platform, and the underlying OS is transformed into commodity plumbing. Adobe's focus at the time was on competing with Microsoft (the article mentions Apple only in passing and Google not at all), but when you declare war on one OS, you declare war on them all.
I don't think you can blame Apple for feeling threatened by this. (Or Google, for that matter, which has been running its own behind the scenes war against Flash by promoting HTML 5.)
I thought it was a brilliant strategy when Adobe announced it. Unfortunately, Adobe's execution hasn't matched its rhetoric. Four years ago, Chizen said Adobe would quickly merge Flash and Acrobat into a runtime environment that would own the next generation of applications. If Adobe had moved quickly, it might have made its platform into a contender, and the software market might look a lot different today. But the new platform, called Adobe Air, was very slow to come to market, and was focused on PCs rather than mobile devices. Today it has very little developer momentum.
Adobe spun its wheels in the mobile market in particular. It insisted on charging for the mobile Flash runtime for a long time, even though it knew that free runtimes are the key to adoption. And then much of the Adobe mobile team was fired in a series of layoffs starting at the end of 2008. Adobe had hired a lot of mobile industry veterans, and by firing them Adobe created the impression in the mobile industry that it was not serious about mobile. There's a very good discussion of some of Adobe's other mobile challenges here.
Fast forward a year and a half from those firings, and Apple has completely seized the initiative with mobile developers. Now Adobe is fighting a defensive battle just to keep Flash relevant.
There's an old quote attributed to Napoleon, "If you start to take Vienna, take Vienna." Adobe failed to take Vienna. Note to other tech companies: Don't declare your intention to take over the world; do it first and explain later. (By the way, this explains both Apple's strategy and Chinese foreign policy, but I digress.)
Because of this history, I find it hard to feel a lot of sympathy for the troubles that Flash is having. I also find it a bit disingenuous when Adobe says that it's fighting for a "multiplatform" world (link), when the company has said previously that it really wants a single platform, led by Adobe, that runs on top of multiple operating systems.
I'm also amused by Adobe's statements that it has always been a proponent of open standards. Adobe cofounders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke wrote:
"That, certainly, was what we learned as we launched PostScript® and PDF, two early and powerful software solutions that work across platforms. We openly published the specifications for both, thus inviting both use and competition. In the early days, PostScript attracted 72 clone makers, but we held onto our market leadership by out-innovating the pack."
Actually, Adobe held onto its leadership in part by building secret, proprietary extensions to PostScript and tying its paid products to them. In an example I saw personally, Adobe's secret APIs in PostScript enabled it to create higher-quality fonts that looked better and ran more efficiently than competitors. As a PostScript developer you were welcome to work with Adobe's low-quality font technology, but Adobe refused to allow any developer to access its proprietary high-quality APIs.
Sounds like something Apple would do, doesn't it?
The real battle
So the real situation around Flash is that Apple won't permit most other platforms on iPhone (no matter how innocuous they are) because it thinks they threaten its survival, while Adobe wants its platform on iPhone so it can set a de facto standard and make money from it. Neither company is really focused on protecting developers or users as its main goal; they are fighting over who gets to use developers to make money.
Unfortunately for developers, this situation makes it more and more likely that the mobile world will continue to be split into incompatible platforms, forcing them to rewrite their programs multiple times in order to reach the broadest group of customers. Theoretically, the mobile browser could become the grand unifier of mobile development, and as I have said before I wish it would (venture capitalist Eric Ver Ploeg makes the case for it here). Unfortunately, the development of those standards has been incredibly slow and political, and after watching that process for years, it's becoming harder and harder to convince myself that it'll ever speed up. I hope it does, but I suspect that one reason Apple's willing to support web standards is because it believes it can dramatically out-innovate them.
In the meantime, Apple and Adobe will continue to duke it out. If Adobe could get customers and developers to boycott Apple products, I guess Apple might be forced to back down. Or Adobe might convince the government to charge Apple with noncompetitive behavior. But I think neither of those is likely to happen. The most likely outcome is that Apple will hold the line against Flash, Adobe will try to run Flash on every other mobile platform, we'll get a lot more posturing from both companies -- and a lot of websites will get rich running Adobe's anti-Apple ads.
Quick thoughts on Palm and HP
It could have been worse. A lot worse.
Many of the companies rumored to be looking at Palm would have bought it mostly for the patents or the brand, and tossed aside everything else. But I think there's a good chance that HP bought the company to keep running it. HP has a long history of activity in the mobile devices market, but hasn't had a lot of knockout success there lately, other than in notebook computers. Palm makes it a player again, or at least potentially a player.
The press release makes it sound like HP was especially interested in the software side of Palm rather than the hardware. WebOS was mentioned six times (compared to one mention of Pre), and Todd Bradley, EVP of the Personal Systems group at HP, was quoted in the press release as saying, "Palm's innovative operating system provides an ideal platform to expand HP’s mobility strategy and create a unique HP experience spanning multiple mobile connected devices."
Sure sounds to me like they're planning to deploy the OS across different classes of devices. And tablets were reportedly mentioned specifically in the press conference after the deal was announced.
So overall, I think Palm users and developers should feel good about the deal. Obviously, everything will depend on execution. But at least the company's not being immediately dismantled, which could easily have happened.
Here are some other thoughts on the deal:
Upside for Palm device sales. With HP's huge sales infrastructure, the Pre can move quickly into a lot of interesting places Palm couldn't easily reach -- especially corporate sales, more international markets, and more operator deals.
Ominous news for Microsoft. Between the gains for Android and the Apple-driven trend toward mobile companies owning their own platforms, the market space for Microsoft's mobile software continues to shrink. But more important than that, HP is the number one Windows vendor, and it now owns its own operating system. That's not an immediate crisis for Microsoft, but it should keep someone there awake at night.
Can the old dog HP learn new tricks? Historically, HP has been pretty close to inept in two areas that Palm knows how to run: Managing a consumer developer community, and creating a great user experience by combining hardware and software. If HP is wise, it will keep the Palm teams intact and let them gradually spread those skills to the rest of the company. On the other hand, if HP tries to "help" the Palm folks execute, it will almost certainly drown them in process and bureaucracy.
What is HP's goal in personal systems? The thing that surprises me most about the Palm purchase is that the rumor mill in Silicon Valley said HP was moving away from differentiation in PCs. The company has laid off many of the Apple refugees who had come in to help run the PC business, and the quirky advertising seems to have faded into the background. Supposedly, HP was much more interested in emulating Acer than Apple in PCs. But the Palm deal positions HP as a much more direct competitor to Apple.
Maybe HP sees mobile as a different marketplace, where investment and innovation can pay off better.
PS: I won't even get into the irony of former Palm CEO Todd Bradley now controlling the company again. Let's just say Silicon Valley is a very small place.
