Ah, yes. $100 per app. I'm sure that's what most apps cost to produce. /s
It seems like they did a few things, but never actually, you know, paid app developers to build out their ecosystem.
Why spend $100,000 developing something one app when you could get 1000 for the same price?!
It's not much worse for MS than 90%, and it makes a much nicer marketing story if you're trying to convince developers to get on your platform.
Either way that experience always comes up for me whenever people talk about the low quality of apps on the Windows store.
> leaves out the fact that 99% of them are either web wrappers or low quality games
This is why we have confounding factors, kids.
I had a Surface Pro 3 at the time and there were maybe 10 apps worth using on a touchscreen. Eventually gave up and sold it to get a Mac and iPad.
https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/15/4433082/microsoft-paying-...
"I'll pay you $100 or split the equity for my cool new app idea!"
No, Microsoft beat Microsoft. It was their game to lose.
You're 100% right, MS beat MS.
Because 7 burned the app bridge with 6.5, thus making it ever easier for someone to justify moving to a different platform.
Never mind that at launch iphone was more fancy featurephone than smartphone.
Not really. iPhone was the first phone ever that shipped with a real, full-featured, non-crippled web browser. This was an astonishing achievement at the time, and one which made its existing competition look like "fancy featurephones," not the reverse. (Really an astonishing achievement period, considering it had 128MB of RAM).
Yes, Walter Isaacson said that others tried to convince Steve about apps at launch, but from the moment he started talking about web apps on that stage in 2007, I never believed for a moment it was really the angle. I knew a couple folks who worked on the first couple revs of iOS, installable apps were always possible, if underdeveloped, from day one. Jobs had lots of resources at Apple in the 80s, and frittered them away on the Lisa and Apple III. He stumbled on Pixar, not knowing where it would go, and had a hell of a time figuring out how to position NeXT, but all those failures taught him that in business, like in art (and we know he felt himself an artist), making the most within the constraints of the medium is they key to success. He came back to Apple on its deathbed. He negotiated with MS for a transfusion to stay alive, and knew even though OS9 sucked, they needed a splash. They had the iMac. Pare down a personal computer to what was needed at the time. Monitor, modem/ethernet, CD drive. No need for a floppy, they're dying, chuck it for an external one you can charge for. No need to pack it with a super spiffy CPU or oodles of RAM, people can pay for an upgrade. Just make it slick looking and work well. Same with the iPod. Pimp it out with upgrades later, after the MVP proves its worth. The G4 cube failed, it never was really iterated on.
He learned from Microsoft, create a MVP, if it seems to catch on, iterate fast.
Barely any platform had 3rd party apps. No one had a streamlined app store, SDK and monetization process like iOS came out with in 2008.
In iOS 2.0 they introduced a new feature that allows you to save web pictures to Photos. Full-feature redefined. :)
Edit: a full-featured television indeed, by Alan Kay's definition: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...
A full-fledged browser experience in 2007 to me means at least I could have mouse hover, to deal with sites not yet adapting to mobile computing (there were a lot of them). WM6 browsers did that. If it fails, I'd go and use my Palm device to VNC into my workstation -- a 2004 Sony device that will be up-to-date forever because it is a decent thin client.
I also remember opera mini being a very handy browser on lower end phones like the S40 models. Since the first iOS safari does not do javascript IIRC, it makes no difference if the rendering is done with WebKit locally, or pre-computed on a server. The only difference is that iPhone has a bigger viewport, which allows you to consider the webpage a minified version of the desktop rendering -- and you are able to freely swipe, zoom, rotate -- not relating to the functionality of the browser itself. I'm not sure if you would agree, but I think, if iPhone1 runs Opera Mobile (with beefy 128MB RAM and fancy graphics chip), it beats the built-in Safari to the ground.
Of course it will cause other troubles -- battery life, thermal management, slow startup, or even unstability etc. This is, to my understanding, why Apple decided to ship a "reduced" version of Safari3.
Edit: adding explainations.
I would have to disagree with that statement. Windows Mobile and BlackBerry allowed 3rd party apps to be installed, but they were both difficult to find and didn't usually add anything beneficial to the phones at the time. Users, for the most part, stuck to what was installed on the phone and that was it. Smartphones were defined by the fact they had an email client and a (relative to the time) high-resolution screen to read and write emails on.
It was a different market in 2007. The idea that a successful smartphone required an app ecosystem was unheard of.
What the iPhone did was genius: they created demand for the phone, but would only sell through phone companies willing to let Apple control the app market. That made all the difference: all of sudden, a developer could make an app and have it show up to bazillions of people.
[disclaimer: I currently work for Microsoft, but not in the phone team. But I do have apps in the Microsoft app store!]
There were many companies living on this stuff. Mobile data was still very expensive, which didn't change for a few more years, and touchscreens were small and crappy. So the market was mostly business logic and CRM apps because they were the ones that could afford it.
That changed when mobile data and big screens became cheap enough for consumers, but I think Apple was as confused about that as everyone else given the state of early iPhones.
LOTS of people got heated when that happened.
For one app? For an app they would have to give away for free? For an app that would always be behind the FB built ios/android apps?
To spend that kind of money on marketing and then not dedicate resources to the actual product seems foolish. And I am not saying they should have done this for only one app. I am saying they should have done this for many apps. If they had created quality versions of, say, the top 25 apps for mobile at the time they would have been in a much better position. I believe they could have made significant traction with business users. Remember, at the time Office wasn't available on other platforms and was (is) a huge draw for many people.
If they had been successful with the strategy and gained market share the partners would have wanted to take over their own apps anyway to enable monetization. But they needed users for that and to get users they needed apps. You have to jump start it somehow.
Now, would it have made any difference? Who knows. But IMO, you either need to not do it or you need to do all parts of it right. You can't go half way on the ecosystem and expect to succeed in an already challenging market.
1: https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/microsoft-half-billion-dol... 2: https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/04/microsoft-oems-pledging-20...
To spend that kind of money on marketing and then not dedicate resources to the actual product seems foolish.
This list keeps changing every month. Remember Pokemon Go?
Other smaller apps would have followed and been made by independent developers but you need to cover the apps almost everybody is using and make them comparable feature and quality/performance wise to iOS and Android versions.
Number one thing most people do on their new phone is download Facebook/Messenger/Twitter. If those apps suck they will immediately have a very bad impression and will switch back to iOS or Android as soon as they get a chance.
Third party developers were moving slowly (or not at all) so Apple started developing and giving away (or selling) apps that showed off what you could do with the new platform.
They developed Safari when Microsoft lost interest in further development of Internet Explorer. The iLife suite had iTunes, iCal, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iWeb and GarageBand. The iWork suite had Numbers, Pages, and Keynote. They created (or bought) professional apps like Logic Pro, Final Cut, Shake, Motion and Aperture.
If you have a new platform and third party developers don't step up, then you need to start filling those holes yourself in a way that shows off your platform's advantages, and keep at it.
If they were serious about growing the user base and building these apps internally was their only course of action (seems like it was) then it should have been taking more seriously (assuming parent is spot on here, I have no idea really.)