3 ms·

This post was perfectly on point. I think it can be argued that Apple has never been developer friendly, but these days it is painfully difficult to ignore. A

This post was perfectly on point. I think it can be argued that Apple has never been developer friendly, but these days it is painfully difficult to ignore. And I think this is a huge mistake, I would not be surprised if Microsoft end-up eating their lunch again.

ethbr0 5y ago
Microsoft bought an entire phone company and still failed in the mobile device market. It's hard to identify a future key differentiator that's going to be strong enough to overcome the iOS (status) and Android (widely deployable) ecosystems.
- stephc_int13 5y ago
  Well, all big companies have their peak and then fail. It can be difficult to imagine but even IBM and Coca Cola are going do disappear into oblivion at some point. Apple is not dead from a financial standpoint. But I'd go as far as to call it an incredibly healthy zombie.
setgree 5y ago
An Apple share was worth a little under $7 when PG wrote this. Today, it hovers around $170, and Apple is the largest corporation in history (which also makes it, in some sense, the largest non-governmental institution in history). What do we think its value would be today if it had been more developer-friendly in the ensuing 12.25 years -- higher, lower, the same? I truly don't know. But either way, a "huge mistake," from Apple's POV, is something that appreciably affects the bottom line. And Apple's insane valuation is face value evidence that anything about its corporate strategy that we view as a huge mistake is probably not. Perhaps there's a case that what Apple has done is a huge ethical mistake, but we'd have to make the case for that very differently.
- Kye 5y ago
  I'm sure many companies felt the same way at their peak. Microsoft certainly lived in its hubris before web and mobile forced it to bet the company on making an AWS for its existing contracts who hadn't yet moved everything to clouds.
- sixstringtheory 5y ago
  > _An Apple share was worth a little under $7 when PG wrote this. Today, it hovers around $170_ And that’s after a 7:1 split in 2014 and a 4:1 split in 2020… money isn’t everything, but they are clearly finding some success via software, which is the fastest growing part of the company of late. Personally, I have plenty of my own gripes with Apple, but ever since switching to their ecosystem 13 years ago I’ve felt like I hopped off a creaky freight train and onto a high speed maglev.

ethbr0 5y ago

Microsoft bought an entire phone company and still failed in the mobile device market. It's hard to identify a future key differentiator that's going to be strong enough to overcome the iOS (status) and Android (widely deployable) ecosystems.

stephc_int13 5y ago
Well, all big companies have their peak and then fail. It can be difficult to imagine but even IBM and Coca Cola are going do disappear into oblivion at some point. Apple is not dead from a financial standpoint. But I'd go as far as to call it an incredibly healthy zombie.

setgree 5y ago

An Apple share was worth a little under $7 when PG wrote this. Today, it hovers around $170, and Apple is the largest corporation in history (which also makes it, in some sense, the largest non-governmental institution in history). What do we think its value would be today if it had been more developer-friendly in the ensuing 12.25 years -- higher, lower, the same? I truly don't know. But either way, a "huge mistake," from Apple's POV, is something that appreciably affects the bottom line. And Apple's insane valuation is face value evidence that anything about its corporate strategy that we view as a huge mistake is probably not. Perhaps there's a case that what Apple has done is a huge ethical mistake, but we'd have to make the case for that very differently.

Kye 5y ago
I'm sure many companies felt the same way at their peak. Microsoft certainly lived in its hubris before web and mobile forced it to bet the company on making an AWS for its existing contracts who hadn't yet moved everything to clouds.
sixstringtheory 5y ago
> _An Apple share was worth a little under $7 when PG wrote this. Today, it hovers around $170_ And that’s after a 7:1 split in 2014 and a 4:1 split in 2020… money isn’t everything, but they are clearly finding some success via software, which is the fastest growing part of the company of late. Personally, I have plenty of my own gripes with Apple, but ever since switching to their ecosystem 13 years ago I’ve felt like I hopped off a creaky freight train and onto a high speed maglev.