I've always thoroughly enjoyed the holiday episodes, despite them being a little lighter in news and Java content. One thing that intrigued me a bit in this episode was Joe's discussion of the measures Apple takes to maintain secrecy around new products, and their reasons for doing so.
Certainly, I understand the benefits of maintaining secrecy around consumer products - I think Apple does a really good job at launching products and that is one of their competitive advantages. However, I've often wondered why they are often so secretive on the developer side of things as well, and was wondering if Joe or anyone else had any insight as to why that is the case. Two examples: 1) The (in)famous Java 6 on OS X issues, which the Posse talked about in this episode as well. >From my perspective, this wasn't so much of an issue of Apple being slow to release Java 6 for OS X (other implementers are often behind Sun as well) as it was an issue of them not communicating what they were doing at all. There was no acknowledgment that they were working on Java 6 support, when they were planning on releasing it, or if they even wanted to support Java on OS X at all anymore. This situation was somewhat exacerbated by some anti-Java statements made by Steve Jobs at around the same time. One unfortunate effect of this - At work, we'd been trying to convince management to let us buy MacBook Pros instead of the usual Dell laptops to use as our primary development machines. They didn't really want to allow us to purchase different hardware, and the lack of information from Apple surrounding Java's future on OS X gave them quite a bit of ammunition. 2) iPhone Developer Program NDAs Back when I was first taking a look at doing iPhone development, I had joined the developer program and was looking for some books on iPhone development. A handful of authors had books ready (or at least in beta form) but were waiting for Apple to lift the NDA before publishing them. Several of the publishers I talked to were pretty frustrated by the lack of communication from Apple - they weren't being told when they planned on lifting the NDA. At this point, the reason for even having NDAs in place was unclear - tens of thousands of developers were already working with the APIs and that isn't where the real competitive advantage for the iPhone was anyway. This delayed potential developers from getting their hands on iPhone development books and frustrated authors and publishers who wanted to get their books out. So, while I fully understand the need for secrecy when it comes to the launch of consumer devices, I'm left scratching my head at cases like these 2 examples where secrecy seems to only confound developers and offers no real benefit to Apple. What does Apple gain by not telling anyone what their plans are for Java on OS X? As a consumer, surprises are often pretty cool, but as a developer or someone looking to invest a lot of time and money into something, surprises are something I'm looking to avoid. Is there some value in keeping stuff like this secret that I'm missing, or is this simply a case of a culture of secrecy that has maybe gone a little too far? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
