16 ms·

Competing with Apple - or "Never mess with your Landlord"

148 points by destraynor 15y ago

chrisjsmith 15y ago
I made a similar comment in one of the "Apple" threads going on. This is sharecropping: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping
- skimbrel 15y ago
  Care to explain that a bit? I fail to see a direct parallel between farmland tenancy arrangements and Apple's relationship to iOS developers. Also, that's a mighty powerful rhetorical weapon (going all the way back to African-American slavery) to be dropping in a discussion about some ticked-off software developers.
  - Joakal 15y ago
    There should be a digital example on wiki but I believe he's referring to this article of a digital sharecropper: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/are-you-a-digital-s...
    - chrisjsmith 15y ago
      That's the one. Probably should have linked to that. I think I heard the term way before that when we were all "application service providers" in the late 90's.
endgame 15y ago
Why do developers continue to let Apple do this to them?
- destraynor 15y ago
  The temptation is too high. Being "the guy" who solves "the problem" that everyone has is really tempting. Everyone will say things like "Oh you should install that app by Des Traynor, it lets you do X (where X is anything everyone wants to do) Its great for a short term publicity kick, to get your name out there. It's just not something to build a business on.
- ghostDancer 15y ago
  I'm not a developer, but i think it's the "that won't happen to me " syndrome that humans tend to suffer, just to deny reality. We do it in our lives everyday, till it happens to us.
  - rimantas 15y ago
    So what is reality? That this will happen to majority of developers? It's the same as with app rejections: if you were listening to the tech media it was like every other app was rejected. In reality there are 425 000 apps in App Store and developers have been paid $2.5 billion.
    - ghostDancer 15y ago
      Sorry i didn't explain well, i don't mean it will happen to everyone or that all the developers are denying reality, what i meant is that everyday we take decisions and even when sometimes the risks are well known we decide to not see it, it's someone else's problems i'm different, i think there are iOS developers that know that problem can happen and make a bet knowingly , but other just prefer not to see the "danger" and then act like it was a surprise , and that happens in all aspects of our lives. And if i were a developer i would probably make the bet, i think the risk is valid.
      - rimantas 15y ago
        But how big is the risk really, unless you are thinking about living all your life with income from just one app, or if you spend to years working on it and then Apple makes it obsolete before you had a chance to release your work. Otherwise you make some money, then make another product and make more money from it. Or is my thinking completely off the track?
        ghostDancer 15y ago
        I don't think you are off the track, from what i understand of this market (and maybe i'm completely wrong) , you are right, no one can think about solving his life with one single phone/pad app, and if you have success with one i like to think that even before that you are preparing another one. It would be like being "one single hit song" band or singer, you can get a lot of money but if you want to live you need more than that, and i think software market is harder than music. There's no magic but i can understand that people can risk a lot of work to give a step so they can make a second one and so on. But i think no one can say that if the land lord fires you from his land is a big surprise, you are the servant and have to pay your tithe while he's interested in you.
- tptacek 15y ago
  Because it pays to. The risk/reward tends to work out.
- ryannielsen 15y ago
  Why do people think this is endemic to desktop software, or even just Apple? Web developers are as much at risk of a major player, like Google, moving into their product space and "stealing" their business away. I'm not defending the practice and saying that it's right or justified. I'm just pointing out that Apple isn't the only company that does this, and Mac OS X and iOS aren't the only platforms where this can happen.
  - mnutt 15y ago
    It's a bit different to have Google begin competing with you, unless you've built your product on Google's APIs. If you're competing with your provider, you're probably not on an even playing field. They can use internal APIs or just completely lock you out if they choose to. On the flip side, Apple has been thinking this way for years, as Steve Jobs tries to minimize Apple's external dependencies. (Adobe Flash, PPC, etc)
- jamesaguilar 15y ago
  What's their alternative? Not work with Apple? Are any of the other vendors any better about this (i.e. "let's not implement good features in our OS because some of our third party devs might be upset")?
- msbarnett 15y ago
  How would they "stop" Apple from doing this to them? Should they ignore the iOS market and let someone else pick up the money they're leaving on the table, or try to own their idea by patenting it and suing everyone else?
  - endgame 15y ago
    Yes. The App market lives and dies by its developers.
- danielrhodes 15y ago
  That is the wrong question to be asking. A better question is: why do most developers let themselves work on software that is not defensible and/or not disruptive?
bediger 15y ago
If Microsoft's app "eco-system" is any indication, people will allow Apple to do this to them for ever.
- destraynor 15y ago
  Well what happens typically is people stop going for the low hanging fruit, and focus on specific verticals. When the best and brightest devs are working on specific areas they love then everyone wins. When they're gap filling, then their best hope is acquisition, no matter how much they love their product. And remember acquisitions aren't guaranteed, and there are only ever one or two of them.
  - nextparadigms 15y ago
    So what's the difference between a vertical and "gap-filling"? If Google didn't have product search, or blog search, and someone went and did that, would they be gap-filling or going after a vertical? Seems to me they're one and the same.
    - sethg 15y ago
      The OP quoted Spolsky mentioning “a feature... for dentists”. That’s one example of a vertical market. My last employer made a search engine specialized for geography: government agencies and energy companies (two other vertical markets) paid beaucoup bucks for it. (Not beaucoup enough to satisfy the VCs, alas, but the product itself is still being sold by another company.)
  - micflan 15y ago
    @nextparadigms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_market http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_market "Search" is not a vertical market. It's something ALL of Google's customers use (or would use, in your hypothetical). I guess I do agree with Des on that main point. Plugging a gap in someone else's software may not be a great long term strategy.
    - 15y ago
baconner 15y ago
The lesson isn't "never mess with your landlord" so much as it's "choose your landlord carefully because they have a lot of power to mess with you."
- thaumaturgy 15y ago
  It's weird -- you're the only person in this thread so far that's got the same takeaway from all of this as I have. I was starting to wonder if maybe I missed something. I've been using and developing on Macs for as long as the Mac has existed, and I've never been more pessimistic about getting in bed with Apple. It's clear that they want to own their entire ecosystem; they want to own the application delivery, they want to own the advertising delivered by it or associated with it, they want to own the hardware and peripherals, they want to own the social atmosphere associated with it, they want to own their customers' data storage ... And that's fine, for Apple and for their customers. But, I can't imagine any reason why any developer in their right mind would see competing with all of that as anything more than a short-term prospect. If you're successful, Apple will eventually try to own you (either by buying you, or, more likely, rolling out a competing product leveraged by the rest of their ecosystem); if you're not successful, it might not be worth doing in the first place. Short-term (say, 1 to 2 year) projects can make decent money, and I guess that's good enough for most people, but there's no point to trying to develop longer-term relationships with customers, or branding, or a market of your own.
  - pnathan 15y ago
    It's also possible to provide a sufficiently large moat in your product that Apple wouldn't be able move across without some decay in focus. E.g., suppose you created an amazing CAD software for Macs. Not just a 3D sketch, but a heavyweight competitor, analogous to AutoCad or 3DStudioMax. Apple can't take your lunch without crossing your moat. I see these addins to the OSX deployment as things that did not have a sufficient moat to cross. And let's face it, if you can build it alone in 6-8 weeks, so can most other hackers, and when a big player comes in, 6-8 weeks is dried peanut shells to them: you lost the game (unless you can move into a niche they won't steamroll over).
micflan 15y ago
But is your point that this is commendable behavior from Apple? Or that developers should just shut up and put up with it regardless? What gets me is that software developers aren't a little more discerning when it comes to fawning uncontrollably over all the good stuff Apple does and just explaining away (is that what you're doing here?) or blinkering out the bad. Why can't this same energy and enthusiasm be directed towards keeping the hardware and software we all depend on for our livelihoods as open and accessible as possible? We are the early adopters and the evangelists. We're the ones our friends and family turn to when they need suggestions on a new computer or MP3 player. Why perpetuate Apple's "our ball, our game, our rules" environment any more than absolutely necessary?
- destraynor 15y ago
  My point is that this is expected behavior from Apple. This is what they do. They build amazing platforms. The chances are that whatever Joe Bloggs little app is, Apple want to do it better/differently. So they will. Why should Apple leave the "to-do list" market alone when they believe they can do it better. And in fact they almost always can do it better because they can integrate in a way no one else can. I don't think this behavior is good or bad. I think it's expected. I didn't criticise Microsoft when they did it. I don't criticise Apple now. I do laugh at folks who do the former but not the latter.
- zmmmmm 15y ago
  Why does it have to be good or bad? It's just business. The only point to take away is, if you are considering developing something for the Apple ecosystem, take into account the business risk that anything you do that is highly successful has a strong likelihood of being "steam rolled". Don't delude yourself that you'll be able to pick some low hanging fruit and make millions. You'll either solve something hard and have a barrier to entry or you'll solve something easy and get steam rolled, hopefully after having enough time in the sun to make it worth your while.
MatthewB 15y ago
Apple's new announcements touched so many startups it's scary. iMessage takes on all the free/group messaging apps that have been built lately. iCloud takes on (maybe not very well) rdio and other streaming music services. Airdrop takes on dropbox, box.net etc. Reminders takes on rememberthemilk and other GTD services. How about the camera plus app that Apple took off the app store for making the volume button a camera button? Now Apple implemented that feature! The Paul Graham quote used in this article was spot on, especially the part about "...you may find that you were merely doing market research for them." This is the problem with building apps on top of another company's API. You will forever be subject to their rules. Whether you're building on Facebook's API, iOS, or even Amazon AWS...you will always be competing to a disadvantage.
- fleitz 15y ago
  No if you use the tools correctly then you'll be a major advantage because it's a lot easier to use the Facebook / Twitter API than to construct those things yourself. If you're building a telco probably not a good idea to use someone else's telco infrastructure, if you're selling chairs, it's probably a good idea to buy phone service, rather than construct your own infrastructure.
  - MatthewB 15y ago
    Maybe. Here's a list of apps that are now threatened by iOS 5: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/which-apps-are-threatened-by-apples-upgrades/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/which-apps-are-thre...
    - arturadib 15y ago
      Ha, I guess they beat me to the punch: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2626409 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2626409
    - fleitz 15y ago
      Does iCloud work on Android? Does it work on a PC? I doubt dropbox and instagram are in any danger because they have barriers to entry that Apple is likely unwilling to take. How many dropbox subscribers are going to go away? Probably not many. Could they lose a bunch of free users? Certainly.
arturadib 15y ago
Exactly - here are some startups hurt by Apple: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2626409 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2626409
nathanb 15y ago
> Don’t try to one-up Apple by doing slightly better versions of what they do, or offering apps they’ll inevitably need to add themselves. Not sure I can get behind this statement. Are developers shortsighted for filling in those gaps until Apple did it themselves? No; the shortsightedness comes in when they assume that just because their product fills a gap, the same gap will always exist. Nobody is ever guaranteed that something bigger, better, and bundled won't come along.
- destraynor 15y ago
  Fair enough Nathan, if you use your gap as a foundation to build something that has legs, then that's fine. I can't think of many examples, but something like Instagram comes to mind. They one upped the Photo app, but used it grow a community. I won't stop using Instagram now, as I follow great photographers there. It's no longer about easy sharing or photo filters.
programminggeek 15y ago
Perhaps it's just my business background talking here, but why is anyone surprised or even upset that Apple continues to do this? All companies are looking for value adds and providing a good/better/best/integrated/whatever version direct in the OS layer is a great way to do this. If you owned a platform, you would do the same thing where appropriate. Smart businesses don't just build an app or a feature, they build a whole business and potentially even a whole platform. For example, look at Remember The Milk or Evernote. Sure, Apple can make their own cloud-synced todo list app. Great. But, RTM is on many different platforms, as is Evernote. They have thousands of customers that will keep using their app even though a system app might do the same thing. My point is just because apple turns your feature into their feature doesn't mean you can't have a successful business. It just means you have to adapt and change. It's no different than if you were running a successful little coffee shop and Starbucks opens up across the street. You can whine that it isn't fair that Starbucks Megacorp Inc. just showed up next door stealing your thunder, or you can take care of your customers so that they don't go across the street. In the end, business is competitive. You have no inherent right to build software or sell it on a given platform or in a given store. The fact that Apple, Google, Microsoft, HP, Amazon and so on make worldwide distribution for indie devs so easy is completely 100% incredible. Just try and sell a physical copy your $0.99 todo list app or game at every Wal-Mart, Target, Best-Buy, Gamestop, Verizon/At&t/Sprint shop in the country then maybe you'll have an idea of just how good you have it.
- mikeleeorg 15y ago
  Agreed. I understand the outrage & fear, but in the eyes of their customers & shareholders, this is exactly what they should be doing. I believe destraynor realizes this too. He wrote, "Apple always look out for their customers." And that's exactly what businesses should do. However, I hope, Apple can handle their relationships with their development community better than Twitter did. I'm curious to see how they'll deal with that.
  - destraynor 15y ago
    Correct. I do realise this. I was trying to be neither complementary nor critical in my post. Funnily enough I've been accused of both here :)
Someone 15y ago
Frankly, what do you expect them to do? They are in it for the money. Operating systems in the narrowest sense (scheduler, memory manager plus file system) became commodities decades ago. Graphics libraries, networking, printing, video and audio player libraries, databases, etc. followed. Even DOS had a fullscreen text editor, in later versions. With complete 2GHz systems costing $250 or so, they would have a hard time selling people "we worked hard for a year, and here it is: it does the same, but it has a slightly faster/more memory efficient/more robust kernel" (battery live drives developments here a bit, but that is about it) So, they start adding features. They could have made APIs for features and allow third parties to plug into them, but I guess doing that would have been more of an effort than building a good one (Android has it easier there with its Java infrastructure), and it just isn't in their DNA to sell a Lego set or to focus on making money from their hardware. Yes, this will hurt some third party software, but I can understand why they 'have' to do this (and no, I do not think they could have gotten away with adding a totally new set of original features instead; people would still have complained about the lack of a decent notification system)
- destraynor 15y ago
  I'm not sure who you're speaking to here, but I'm the author of the post and I wasn't criticizing Apple at all. I'm just explaining why it is the way it is.
  - killerdark 15y ago
    I think it's a rhetorical question.
  - alanh 15y ago
    Your article came off fairly neutral, yes. But a lot of people seem to be taking an upset posture. Your parent comment seems to be speaking to them, on the same topic as (but not in contradiction to) your post.
    - Someone 15y ago
      That is correct. Sometimes, I cannot find a clear place to 'hook' a comment into a discussion. I then tend to make a top-level comment. I should have made it clear that my response wasn't aimed at your text.
dorian-graph 15y ago
.. and Microsoft apparently isn't allowed to bundle Windows Media Player with Windows.
- destraynor 15y ago
  If they did that there would be cries of evil Monopolistic Micro$oft. Meet the new boss, Just like the old boss.
  - pyre 15y ago
    I think part of the difference was that M$ was intentionally putting up roadblocks on their platform with no other purpose than to block potential competition (e.g. Netscape vs IE). Apple will be guilty of the same thing if they in turn start using the AppStore guidelines of 'no duplicate OS functionality' to boot all of these players off of the platform rather than letting them continue to compete and differentiate their offers from Apple's.
    - dorian-graph 15y ago
      I remember reading yesterday that some camera app was forced to remove the use volume buttons as photo taker or so. There was several examples of apps that essentially 'went out of business' like Konfabulator, some early theming engine for Mac and the like with some dubious practices from Apple.
Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
Joel Spolsky spoke about this on the SO podcast a while back in terms of people who develop extensions for Visual Studio (though it extends to all IDEs and indeed a lot of software). He described certain applications as grabbing nickels from the path of an on-coming steamroller. Effectively what he was saying was that there are things which are going to be added to products eventually and while there is money to be made by getting there first, the developer needs to accept that it's inevitable that they're going to be ploughed down eventually. But this isn't just Apple and it's not just iOS, it's software and in particularly operating systems everywhere (or does someone want to tell me that the differences between Windows 1.0 and Windows 7 hasn't impacted on any developers anywhere?). If your business model is taking what someone else does and doing it just a tiny bit better this comes with the territory. You either need to live with that or keep doing it better so they don't catch up. Marco Arment wrote a piece on how he didn't care about a rumoured forthcoming addition to iOS despite it competing with Instapaper because he felt he could bring more to it than Apple would and in fact it might bring him new customers by raising awareness of this sort of feature. If you're not thinking that then I'm sorry to say that your product really wasn't strong enough or different enough in the first place for it to be anything other than a short term venture.
- pyre 15y ago
  > because he felt he could bring more to it > than Apple would Until his next update is rejected because it duplicates functionality that iOS already provides and would 'confuse' consumers (so could you please stop attempting to compete with us, please?).
  - skimbrel 15y ago
    It's been pointed out on the other thread, but this tends to happen when iOS had the functionality first, not the other way round. Apple allows plenty of camera apps and other such "duplicated functionality" to remain in the app store.
    - pyre 15y ago
      That may be, but it becomes something of an 'unenforced law,' which is something that I'm not very fond about. If the terms of service allow them to boot that App at any time (but for the time-being they are going with an interpretation that is favorable to you), then you are still on shaky ground.
psychotik 15y ago
Well, you can still out-execute them or build apps better than they can. I don't think fear of competing with Apple should stop you from building products. If anything, it can server as motivation and spur better products for users.
crikli 15y ago
This conversation reminds me of the discussions we've had about software patents. We're all against those, of course. Yet we're taking umbrage with Apple integrating functionality from existing apps into iOS/OSX. Aren't these conversations fundamentally about the same concept, the protection (or lack thereof) afforded to the owner of an executed idea? It seems like it's the same conversation with the only difference being our role in the vignette. If it's the story of Lodsys, we're accused of infringement. If it's the story of iOS5, we're the infringed.
- georgemcbay 15y ago
  I'm anti-patent and also OK with Apple baking these features right into the OS just like I'm OK with Microsoft (or any other OS maker) shipping a browser with the OS. If the features are useful to such a great number of end-users, they should be there in the base install, it makes for a better user experience even if it does cause pain for some small business owners. Nobody is owed a business just because they already have one, this goes for app devs just as well as anyone else. As with browsers on Windows there will be plenty of room for alternatives to the base implementation so long as they offer a decent value proposition. The only thing about this that would get me up in arms is if Apple started blocking updates to the existing apps because they "duplicate functionality". I don't think we can really count them out from doing that based on some past events, though I do hope they've moved beyond that by now.
ignifero 15y ago
This is kind of inevitable in any evolving platform . The best we can hope is open standards, that's why my bet is on web apps and better mobile browsers
Thad_McIlroy 15y ago
When I joined McCutcheon Graphics in 1986 to sell Apple's then-new "desktop publishing" hardware -- the Mac and the LaserWriter and Aldus PageMaker, the prescient genius David Henry Goodstein (http://williamshepherd.blog.co.uk/2006/06/10/thursday_8th_june~867380/ http://williamshepherd.blog.co.uk/2006/06/10/thursday_8th_ju...) warned us: Remember "Apple will always eat its children".
bergie 15y ago
I used to work at Stonesoft, a company which was back then selling a high-availability extension for Check Point's firewall (http://bit.ly/ivZ22L http://bit.ly/ivZ22L). A really lucrative business, especially as Check Point's existing customers were an easy market to sell to. Then one day Check Point released their own high-availability solution. Stonesoft hasn't been profitable in the approx. 10 years since.
kahawe 15y ago
This sort of reminds me of Audion and iTunes back in the day - though there was no Music or App Store back then. http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ "That's interesting, because honestly? I don't think you guys have a chance." "It's like you guys are a little push-cart going down the railroad tracks, and we're a giant steam engine about to run you down."
- ericd 15y ago
  That was a seriously great story, and probably deserves its own submission.
  - kahawe 15y ago
    This has already been submitted a bit over 2 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=620698 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=620698 Any suggestions? It does have a certain relevance now since Apple is much more widely successful and given their recent announcements.
dbaugh 15y ago
The only real businesses affected by this are Instapaper and Dropbox. The rest are just cool applications that our bubble media props up as enterprises.

148 points by destraynor 15y ago

I made a similar comment in one of the "Apple" threads going on. This is sharecropping: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping

skimbrel 15y ago
Care to explain that a bit? I fail to see a direct parallel between farmland tenancy arrangements and Apple's relationship to iOS developers. Also, that's a mighty powerful rhetorical weapon (going all the way back to African-American slavery) to be dropping in a discussion about some ticked-off software developers.
- Joakal 15y ago
  There should be a digital example on wiki but I believe he's referring to this article of a digital sharecropper: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/are-you-a-digital-s...
  - chrisjsmith 15y ago
    That's the one. Probably should have linked to that. I think I heard the term way before that when we were all "application service providers" in the late 90's.

endgame 15y ago

Why do developers continue to let Apple do this to them?

destraynor 15y ago
The temptation is too high. Being "the guy" who solves "the problem" that everyone has is really tempting. Everyone will say things like "Oh you should install that app by Des Traynor, it lets you do X (where X is anything everyone wants to do) Its great for a short term publicity kick, to get your name out there. It's just not something to build a business on.
ghostDancer 15y ago
I'm not a developer, but i think it's the "that won't happen to me " syndrome that humans tend to suffer, just to deny reality. We do it in our lives everyday, till it happens to us.
- rimantas 15y ago
  So what is reality? That this will happen to majority of developers? It's the same as with app rejections: if you were listening to the tech media it was like every other app was rejected. In reality there are 425 000 apps in App Store and developers have been paid $2.5 billion.
  - ghostDancer 15y ago
    Sorry i didn't explain well, i don't mean it will happen to everyone or that all the developers are denying reality, what i meant is that everyday we take decisions and even when sometimes the risks are well known we decide to not see it, it's someone else's problems i'm different, i think there are iOS developers that know that problem can happen and make a bet knowingly , but other just prefer not to see the "danger" and then act like it was a surprise , and that happens in all aspects of our lives. And if i were a developer i would probably make the bet, i think the risk is valid.
    - rimantas 15y ago
      But how big is the risk really, unless you are thinking about living all your life with income from just one app, or if you spend to years working on it and then Apple makes it obsolete before you had a chance to release your work. Otherwise you make some money, then make another product and make more money from it. Or is my thinking completely off the track?
      - ghostDancer 15y ago
        I don't think you are off the track, from what i understand of this market (and maybe i'm completely wrong) , you are right, no one can think about solving his life with one single phone/pad app, and if you have success with one i like to think that even before that you are preparing another one. It would be like being "one single hit song" band or singer, you can get a lot of money but if you want to live you need more than that, and i think software market is harder than music. There's no magic but i can understand that people can risk a lot of work to give a step so they can make a second one and so on. But i think no one can say that if the land lord fires you from his land is a big surprise, you are the servant and have to pay your tithe while he's interested in you.
tptacek 15y ago
Because it pays to. The risk/reward tends to work out.
ryannielsen 15y ago
Why do people think this is endemic to desktop software, or even just Apple? Web developers are as much at risk of a major player, like Google, moving into their product space and "stealing" their business away. I'm not defending the practice and saying that it's right or justified. I'm just pointing out that Apple isn't the only company that does this, and Mac OS X and iOS aren't the only platforms where this can happen.
- mnutt 15y ago
  It's a bit different to have Google begin competing with you, unless you've built your product on Google's APIs. If you're competing with your provider, you're probably not on an even playing field. They can use internal APIs or just completely lock you out if they choose to. On the flip side, Apple has been thinking this way for years, as Steve Jobs tries to minimize Apple's external dependencies. (Adobe Flash, PPC, etc)
jamesaguilar 15y ago
What's their alternative? Not work with Apple? Are any of the other vendors any better about this (i.e. "let's not implement good features in our OS because some of our third party devs might be upset")?
msbarnett 15y ago
How would they "stop" Apple from doing this to them? Should they ignore the iOS market and let someone else pick up the money they're leaving on the table, or try to own their idea by patenting it and suing everyone else?
- endgame 15y ago
  Yes. The App market lives and dies by its developers.
danielrhodes 15y ago
That is the wrong question to be asking. A better question is: why do most developers let themselves work on software that is not defensible and/or not disruptive?

bediger 15y ago

If Microsoft's app "eco-system" is any indication, people will allow Apple to do this to them for ever.

destraynor 15y ago
Well what happens typically is people stop going for the low hanging fruit, and focus on specific verticals. When the best and brightest devs are working on specific areas they love then everyone wins. When they're gap filling, then their best hope is acquisition, no matter how much they love their product. And remember acquisitions aren't guaranteed, and there are only ever one or two of them.
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  So what's the difference between a vertical and "gap-filling"? If Google didn't have product search, or blog search, and someone went and did that, would they be gap-filling or going after a vertical? Seems to me they're one and the same.
  - sethg 15y ago
    The OP quoted Spolsky mentioning “a feature... for dentists”. That’s one example of a vertical market. My last employer made a search engine specialized for geography: government agencies and energy companies (two other vertical markets) paid beaucoup bucks for it. (Not beaucoup enough to satisfy the VCs, alas, but the product itself is still being sold by another company.)
- micflan 15y ago
  @nextparadigms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_market http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_market "Search" is not a vertical market. It's something ALL of Google's customers use (or would use, in your hypothetical). I guess I do agree with Des on that main point. Plugging a gap in someone else's software may not be a great long term strategy.
  - 15y ago

baconner 15y ago

The lesson isn't "never mess with your landlord" so much as it's "choose your landlord carefully because they have a lot of power to mess with you."

thaumaturgy 15y ago
It's weird -- you're the only person in this thread so far that's got the same takeaway from all of this as I have. I was starting to wonder if maybe I missed something. I've been using and developing on Macs for as long as the Mac has existed, and I've never been more pessimistic about getting in bed with Apple. It's clear that they want to own their entire ecosystem; they want to own the application delivery, they want to own the advertising delivered by it or associated with it, they want to own the hardware and peripherals, they want to own the social atmosphere associated with it, they want to own their customers' data storage ... And that's fine, for Apple and for their customers. But, I can't imagine any reason why any developer in their right mind would see competing with all of that as anything more than a short-term prospect. If you're successful, Apple will eventually try to own you (either by buying you, or, more likely, rolling out a competing product leveraged by the rest of their ecosystem); if you're not successful, it might not be worth doing in the first place. Short-term (say, 1 to 2 year) projects can make decent money, and I guess that's good enough for most people, but there's no point to trying to develop longer-term relationships with customers, or branding, or a market of your own.
- pnathan 15y ago
  It's also possible to provide a sufficiently large moat in your product that Apple wouldn't be able move across without some decay in focus. E.g., suppose you created an amazing CAD software for Macs. Not just a 3D sketch, but a heavyweight competitor, analogous to AutoCad or 3DStudioMax. Apple can't take your lunch without crossing your moat. I see these addins to the OSX deployment as things that did not have a sufficient moat to cross. And let's face it, if you can build it alone in 6-8 weeks, so can most other hackers, and when a big player comes in, 6-8 weeks is dried peanut shells to them: you lost the game (unless you can move into a niche they won't steamroll over).

micflan 15y ago

But is your point that this is commendable behavior from Apple? Or that developers should just shut up and put up with it regardless? What gets me is that software developers aren't a little more discerning when it comes to fawning uncontrollably over all the good stuff Apple does and just explaining away (is that what you're doing here?) or blinkering out the bad. Why can't this same energy and enthusiasm be directed towards keeping the hardware and software we all depend on for our livelihoods as open and accessible as possible? We are the early adopters and the evangelists. We're the ones our friends and family turn to when they need suggestions on a new computer or MP3 player. Why perpetuate Apple's "our ball, our game, our rules" environment any more than absolutely necessary?

destraynor 15y ago
My point is that this is expected behavior from Apple. This is what they do. They build amazing platforms. The chances are that whatever Joe Bloggs little app is, Apple want to do it better/differently. So they will. Why should Apple leave the "to-do list" market alone when they believe they can do it better. And in fact they almost always can do it better because they can integrate in a way no one else can. I don't think this behavior is good or bad. I think it's expected. I didn't criticise Microsoft when they did it. I don't criticise Apple now. I do laugh at folks who do the former but not the latter.
zmmmmm 15y ago
Why does it have to be good or bad? It's just business. The only point to take away is, if you are considering developing something for the Apple ecosystem, take into account the business risk that anything you do that is highly successful has a strong likelihood of being "steam rolled". Don't delude yourself that you'll be able to pick some low hanging fruit and make millions. You'll either solve something hard and have a barrier to entry or you'll solve something easy and get steam rolled, hopefully after having enough time in the sun to make it worth your while.

MatthewB 15y ago

Apple's new announcements touched so many startups it's scary. iMessage takes on all the free/group messaging apps that have been built lately. iCloud takes on (maybe not very well) rdio and other streaming music services. Airdrop takes on dropbox, box.net etc. Reminders takes on rememberthemilk and other GTD services. How about the camera plus app that Apple took off the app store for making the volume button a camera button? Now Apple implemented that feature! The Paul Graham quote used in this article was spot on, especially the part about "...you may find that you were merely doing market research for them." This is the problem with building apps on top of another company's API. You will forever be subject to their rules. Whether you're building on Facebook's API, iOS, or even Amazon AWS...you will always be competing to a disadvantage.

fleitz 15y ago
No if you use the tools correctly then you'll be a major advantage because it's a lot easier to use the Facebook / Twitter API than to construct those things yourself. If you're building a telco probably not a good idea to use someone else's telco infrastructure, if you're selling chairs, it's probably a good idea to buy phone service, rather than construct your own infrastructure.
- MatthewB 15y ago
  Maybe. Here's a list of apps that are now threatened by iOS 5: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/which-apps-are-threatened-by-apples-upgrades/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/which-apps-are-thre...
  - arturadib 15y ago
    Ha, I guess they beat me to the punch: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2626409 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2626409
  - fleitz 15y ago
    Does iCloud work on Android? Does it work on a PC? I doubt dropbox and instagram are in any danger because they have barriers to entry that Apple is likely unwilling to take. How many dropbox subscribers are going to go away? Probably not many. Could they lose a bunch of free users? Certainly.

arturadib 15y ago

Exactly - here are some startups hurt by Apple: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2626409 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2626409

nathanb 15y ago

> Don’t try to one-up Apple by doing slightly better versions of what they do, or offering apps they’ll inevitably need to add themselves. Not sure I can get behind this statement. Are developers shortsighted for filling in those gaps until Apple did it themselves? No; the shortsightedness comes in when they assume that just because their product fills a gap, the same gap will always exist. Nobody is ever guaranteed that something bigger, better, and bundled won't come along.

destraynor 15y ago
Fair enough Nathan, if you use your gap as a foundation to build something that has legs, then that's fine. I can't think of many examples, but something like Instagram comes to mind. They one upped the Photo app, but used it grow a community. I won't stop using Instagram now, as I follow great photographers there. It's no longer about easy sharing or photo filters.

programminggeek 15y ago

Perhaps it's just my business background talking here, but why is anyone surprised or even upset that Apple continues to do this? All companies are looking for value adds and providing a good/better/best/integrated/whatever version direct in the OS layer is a great way to do this. If you owned a platform, you would do the same thing where appropriate. Smart businesses don't just build an app or a feature, they build a whole business and potentially even a whole platform. For example, look at Remember The Milk or Evernote. Sure, Apple can make their own cloud-synced todo list app. Great. But, RTM is on many different platforms, as is Evernote. They have thousands of customers that will keep using their app even though a system app might do the same thing. My point is just because apple turns your feature into their feature doesn't mean you can't have a successful business. It just means you have to adapt and change. It's no different than if you were running a successful little coffee shop and Starbucks opens up across the street. You can whine that it isn't fair that Starbucks Megacorp Inc. just showed up next door stealing your thunder, or you can take care of your customers so that they don't go across the street. In the end, business is competitive. You have no inherent right to build software or sell it on a given platform or in a given store. The fact that Apple, Google, Microsoft, HP, Amazon and so on make worldwide distribution for indie devs so easy is completely 100% incredible. Just try and sell a physical copy your $0.99 todo list app or game at every Wal-Mart, Target, Best-Buy, Gamestop, Verizon/At&t/Sprint shop in the country then maybe you'll have an idea of just how good you have it.

mikeleeorg 15y ago
Agreed. I understand the outrage & fear, but in the eyes of their customers & shareholders, this is exactly what they should be doing. I believe destraynor realizes this too. He wrote, "Apple always look out for their customers." And that's exactly what businesses should do. However, I hope, Apple can handle their relationships with their development community better than Twitter did. I'm curious to see how they'll deal with that.
- destraynor 15y ago
  Correct. I do realise this. I was trying to be neither complementary nor critical in my post. Funnily enough I've been accused of both here :)

Someone 15y ago

Frankly, what do you expect them to do? They are in it for the money. Operating systems in the narrowest sense (scheduler, memory manager plus file system) became commodities decades ago. Graphics libraries, networking, printing, video and audio player libraries, databases, etc. followed. Even DOS had a fullscreen text editor, in later versions. With complete 2GHz systems costing $250 or so, they would have a hard time selling people "we worked hard for a year, and here it is: it does the same, but it has a slightly faster/more memory efficient/more robust kernel" (battery live drives developments here a bit, but that is about it) So, they start adding features. They could have made APIs for features and allow third parties to plug into them, but I guess doing that would have been more of an effort than building a good one (Android has it easier there with its Java infrastructure), and it just isn't in their DNA to sell a Lego set or to focus on making money from their hardware. Yes, this will hurt some third party software, but I can understand why they 'have' to do this (and no, I do not think they could have gotten away with adding a totally new set of original features instead; people would still have complained about the lack of a decent notification system)

destraynor 15y ago
I'm not sure who you're speaking to here, but I'm the author of the post and I wasn't criticizing Apple at all. I'm just explaining why it is the way it is.
- killerdark 15y ago
  I think it's a rhetorical question.
- alanh 15y ago
  Your article came off fairly neutral, yes. But a lot of people seem to be taking an upset posture. Your parent comment seems to be speaking to them, on the same topic as (but not in contradiction to) your post.
  - Someone 15y ago
    That is correct. Sometimes, I cannot find a clear place to 'hook' a comment into a discussion. I then tend to make a top-level comment. I should have made it clear that my response wasn't aimed at your text.

dorian-graph 15y ago

.. and Microsoft apparently isn't allowed to bundle Windows Media Player with Windows.

destraynor 15y ago
If they did that there would be cries of evil Monopolistic Micro$oft. Meet the new boss, Just like the old boss.
- pyre 15y ago
  I think part of the difference was that M$ was intentionally putting up roadblocks on their platform with no other purpose than to block potential competition (e.g. Netscape vs IE). Apple will be guilty of the same thing if they in turn start using the AppStore guidelines of 'no duplicate OS functionality' to boot all of these players off of the platform rather than letting them continue to compete and differentiate their offers from Apple's.
  - dorian-graph 15y ago
    I remember reading yesterday that some camera app was forced to remove the use volume buttons as photo taker or so. There was several examples of apps that essentially 'went out of business' like Konfabulator, some early theming engine for Mac and the like with some dubious practices from Apple.

Tyrannosaurs 15y ago

Joel Spolsky spoke about this on the SO podcast a while back in terms of people who develop extensions for Visual Studio (though it extends to all IDEs and indeed a lot of software). He described certain applications as grabbing nickels from the path of an on-coming steamroller. Effectively what he was saying was that there are things which are going to be added to products eventually and while there is money to be made by getting there first, the developer needs to accept that it's inevitable that they're going to be ploughed down eventually. But this isn't just Apple and it's not just iOS, it's software and in particularly operating systems everywhere (or does someone want to tell me that the differences between Windows 1.0 and Windows 7 hasn't impacted on any developers anywhere?). If your business model is taking what someone else does and doing it just a tiny bit better this comes with the territory. You either need to live with that or keep doing it better so they don't catch up. Marco Arment wrote a piece on how he didn't care about a rumoured forthcoming addition to iOS despite it competing with Instapaper because he felt he could bring more to it than Apple would and in fact it might bring him new customers by raising awareness of this sort of feature. If you're not thinking that then I'm sorry to say that your product really wasn't strong enough or different enough in the first place for it to be anything other than a short term venture.

pyre 15y ago
> because he felt he could bring more to it > than Apple would Until his next update is rejected because it duplicates functionality that iOS already provides and would 'confuse' consumers (so could you please stop attempting to compete with us, please?).
- skimbrel 15y ago
  It's been pointed out on the other thread, but this tends to happen when iOS had the functionality first, not the other way round. Apple allows plenty of camera apps and other such "duplicated functionality" to remain in the app store.
  - pyre 15y ago
    That may be, but it becomes something of an 'unenforced law,' which is something that I'm not very fond about. If the terms of service allow them to boot that App at any time (but for the time-being they are going with an interpretation that is favorable to you), then you are still on shaky ground.

psychotik 15y ago

Well, you can still out-execute them or build apps better than they can. I don't think fear of competing with Apple should stop you from building products. If anything, it can server as motivation and spur better products for users.

crikli 15y ago

This conversation reminds me of the discussions we've had about software patents. We're all against those, of course. Yet we're taking umbrage with Apple integrating functionality from existing apps into iOS/OSX. Aren't these conversations fundamentally about the same concept, the protection (or lack thereof) afforded to the owner of an executed idea? It seems like it's the same conversation with the only difference being our role in the vignette. If it's the story of Lodsys, we're accused of infringement. If it's the story of iOS5, we're the infringed.

georgemcbay 15y ago
I'm anti-patent and also OK with Apple baking these features right into the OS just like I'm OK with Microsoft (or any other OS maker) shipping a browser with the OS. If the features are useful to such a great number of end-users, they should be there in the base install, it makes for a better user experience even if it does cause pain for some small business owners. Nobody is owed a business just because they already have one, this goes for app devs just as well as anyone else. As with browsers on Windows there will be plenty of room for alternatives to the base implementation so long as they offer a decent value proposition. The only thing about this that would get me up in arms is if Apple started blocking updates to the existing apps because they "duplicate functionality". I don't think we can really count them out from doing that based on some past events, though I do hope they've moved beyond that by now.

ignifero 15y ago

This is kind of inevitable in any evolving platform . The best we can hope is open standards, that's why my bet is on web apps and better mobile browsers

Thad_McIlroy 15y ago

When I joined McCutcheon Graphics in 1986 to sell Apple's then-new "desktop publishing" hardware -- the Mac and the LaserWriter and Aldus PageMaker, the prescient genius David Henry Goodstein (http://williamshepherd.blog.co.uk/2006/06/10/thursday_8th_june~867380/ http://williamshepherd.blog.co.uk/2006/06/10/thursday_8th_ju...) warned us: Remember "Apple will always eat its children".

bergie 15y ago

I used to work at Stonesoft, a company which was back then selling a high-availability extension for Check Point's firewall (http://bit.ly/ivZ22L http://bit.ly/ivZ22L). A really lucrative business, especially as Check Point's existing customers were an easy market to sell to. Then one day Check Point released their own high-availability solution. Stonesoft hasn't been profitable in the approx. 10 years since.

kahawe 15y ago

This sort of reminds me of Audion and iTunes back in the day - though there was no Music or App Store back then. http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ "That's interesting, because honestly? I don't think you guys have a chance." "It's like you guys are a little push-cart going down the railroad tracks, and we're a giant steam engine about to run you down."

ericd 15y ago
That was a seriously great story, and probably deserves its own submission.
- kahawe 15y ago
  This has already been submitted a bit over 2 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=620698 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=620698 Any suggestions? It does have a certain relevance now since Apple is much more widely successful and given their recent announcements.

dbaugh 15y ago

The only real businesses affected by this are Instapaper and Dropbox. The rest are just cool applications that our bubble media props up as enterprises.