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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=449
Comment: Is Apple For or Against Smaller Developers?
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
May 22nd 2002
Where does a 600-pound bear sit? Where they like.
Charles Haddad, in his latest Byte of the Apple column, examines Apple''s so-called
"knock-offs" of other developers'' ideas, of which iChat is only the latest, he says.
Charles cites iTunes, iMovie and other as derivative of others'' works, and makes
Apple look suspiciously like Microsoft in the ways it absorbs smaller developers''
ideas.
Personally though, I don''t quite "get" Charles'' defence of this: "Still, I don''t
think developers'' complaints about Apple have much bite. Apple may dominate its turf,
but it''s not a particularly big one in the vast playground of the PC market."
Haddad argues that OS X has bred a "second golden age" of innovation. There''s no
argument on that score - at least as far as getting Unix developers on board.
But the bottom line is that Apple can grind smaller developers into the dust. Last
year, a small developer wrote to IGM following a story on Apple being secretive about
important code, and claimed that Apple wanted to privilege MS and Adobe above all
others.
His claims went further: he argued that Apple wanted to destroy all small developers
and to develop most of its software in house.
I took this last bit with a grain of salt: for a start, short of axing developer
programmes entirely (a sure-fire way to commit rapid corporate suicide), not even
Apple can stop Unix and other Mac OS X developers building cracks, hacks and
fully-fledged shareware and commercialware. And what incentive woudl there be to do so?
But there is some truth in what our developer says: how many MP3 apps have come to OS
X (or 9, for that matter?) since iTunes came out? MPEGToaster, MacAmp last week
belatedly. Will people pay for them? Where are the competitors to iMovie? iPhoto?
iDVD? Sure, iPhoto, for instance, was late on the Mac photo market, but these things
are either all free or bundled with new Macs. Or they''re easily accessible by many
people under site licenses.
But the disincentive to develop in market sectors where Apple gives out free software
must be enormous. Were there not such a large installed base of PC users with Premiere
deployed, I wonder how long Adobe would keep developing that?
Remember how Microsoft used to complain about ClarisWorks being bundled with Performas
and the like? It killed MS Works for Mac (no bad thing); but, worse, it affected
Office sales.
Compared with MS, Apple is a small developer. Guess whose productivity suite is
hobbled because MS (probably contractually) demanded it?
I agree with Charlesx that Apple doesn''t always "play nice". But I''m also sure the
company could mount a considerable defense to this accusation and point at 3,000 OS X
apps.
But the bottom line is that if you''re a developer looking to get a slice of the Mac
action, you''d do well to steer clear of areas where Apple has already settled its
prodigious software weight.
Post your comments at:
http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=449
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Copyright (c) 2001 Insanely Great Mac. All rights reserved. This article
may not be republished in part or whole without explicit written
permission from IGM Publishing.
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