I followed a lively Twitter exchange over Paul Graham's "Apple's Mistake" blog post. The iPhone app. developer half of the Twitter discussion noted that the App. Store is not controlling the apps. so much as the experience. Good point, but it's also hard to argue Graham's slam-dunk observation that "VisiCalc made the Apple II." I read that snippet of the article to my husband, who opined that the two were more or less synonymous Back In The Day. Just like Windows and Office were the peanut butter and honey--it's "honey," not "jelly," in our house, anyway--pairing of 1990s offices.
In other words, if you wanted Microsoft Office, you had to buy a Windows PC. And if you bought the Windows PC alone, chances are that you ended up buying Office just to shut up everybody who sat down at that PC and wanted to know where Office was b/c they needed to write a document. I'll leave the question of which of the two (platform and killer app.) is the chicken and which is the egg to poultry-farming philosophers, but you get the idea...
I'm not sure that iPhone-Blackberry comparisons are spot-on, though. Blackberry (as a platform, albeit a more closed one) has its "killer app.", namely nomadic email that can be synchronized with settled community email. The "phone" part of the Blackberry was an afterthought, really. By contrast, the iPhone has no killer app. In fairness, neither do Android phones, nor any other wanna-be gadgetry. And until that killer app.--assuming that it's geared to one platform over all others--lands, I think we're basically looking at a Western Front trenches-and-barbed-wire-style stalemate.
Near the end of the post, Graham puts a twist on the question of developing for the gadget market by wondering whether someone will write an application that allows you to develop software for the gadget directly on the gadget,rather than having to use a PC or Mac to write and actually install it (and possibly the intermediary of a "store" or "marketplace" gatekeeper besides). Apple certainly wouldn't allow such roll-your-own software to darken the doors of the App. Store.
I don't want to imply that the roll-your-own-software application that Paul Graham describes meets the definition of a killer app. That term is reserved for software with mass appeal. In the mass-market, there will always be a tug-of-war between style/polish and the bleeding-edge cool factor. A roll-your-own environment leans heavily toward the latter. Additionally, the reduced friction in the development process (even without gatekeepers and related red tape) means that developers have a bit of an edge in the first-to-market race. That's more than a passing concern to anyone who might be providing outside funding.
Would a frictionless, venture-capitalist-friendly gadget software development environment be enough to tip the balance away from Apple's carefully-managed menagerie and toward the wilder jungle of an open platform? I won't presume to guess. Like most folks, I'll probably figure it out when the chicken and egg are at last in sight.
