How to kill your burgeoning business in 5 easy steps
by George White
Say you have a new, wildly successful platform, the new hotness. Everyone wants to buy the hardware and developers can’t wait to get on board. You’ve set up a nifty distribution channel and things are rollig along. So, how do you make it fail?
- Make all of the developers sign NDAs and give them no way to talk about developing on your platform, good or bad.
- When developers try to publish their apps to your platform, make sure you reject the apps because they might compete with your own.
- When people start to complain about your practices, try using the NDA to muzzle them.
- Don’t explain to developers why they had to sign the NDA is the first place or why it’s still in effect now that you’ve got a publicly available SDK anyone can download, including your competitor.
- Rinse and repeat.
I have been a huge fan of Apple for years. I’m writing this post on my MacBook; I would rather stop using computers all together than go back to Windows for my personal needs. But the stunts they are pulling with the iPhone development community are stunningly wrong-headed. Really stupid ideas from a company that has succeeded by being (mostly) smart.
There’s a lot Apple has done right for the community: the take from the App Store is weighted to favor developers and pushing out the SDK to the world is a great idea. Apple didn’t have to open up the iPhone at all, but realized that being open was the path to winning the market.
But all of the good they’ve done is quickly being eroded by the practices they appear to be following. Many active iPhone developers are already starting to wonder if they made the wrong choice. And the bad press and ill will being created now is likely to drive other developers away. I know that I was initially excited about the prospect of coding for the iPhone, but I won’t touch it unless I know that Apple can’t arbitrarily cut me off and try to keep me from talking about it.
Apple is creating a stigma which is hurting them (and the iPhone today) and could wreck the success they’ve had since the release of the iPhone. And that’s a shame.
Tags: Apple, Business and Process
October 1st, 2008 at 12:38 pm
I think you got to Apple. It seems that they are dropping the NDA.
John
October 1st, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Yeah, I saw that. And I’m very happy about it! Of course, they could keep messing around with the App Store, but this is a big step in the right direction.
Thanks, Android!
October 2nd, 2008 at 2:44 am
Interesting post, George! I think App Store was one of the best ideas Apple has come up with lately, but the “highly controlled environment” does not exactly foster the “free market” spirit that makes successful products stellar and bad one sink. Nothing is more painful than a 2-week approval process for any code update (screaming out loud as an iPhone app developer myself)!
December 3rd, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Have you guys taken a look at Cydia or Installer for distribution, instead of AppStore. I know the audience will be a lot smaller; but what your capable of distributing for an application increases greatly. I guess I am advocating use of a hack..
FYI - Eldar I used your app to find my car
BTW - What up fellas… OK back to fashion…
December 3rd, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Shawn! Nice to hear from you, man…
We haven’t really looked at jailbroken solutions. To tell the truth, the “legit” path is pretty clean now and if the latest numbers are anything to go by, it’s working out from most developers.
What fascinates me now is the economics of AppStore pricing. Check out this post from O’Reilly Radar: http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/12/iphone-app-store-first-five-mo.html. There’s a received wisdom that applications in the AppStore have to be near free to get traction. There’s some evidence this isn’t always true; perhaps I’ll write another post about that.