I just watched the video of the “March 6 event” where Apple outlined their software roadmap for iPhone and announced the long-awaited SDK.

I’ve also been reading a lot on various websites and blogs about people’s reactions to said roadmap.I think Apple is on something really big here. Not just big as in “OMG! Leopard is sooooo much better than Vista”, but big as in “iPod-big”.

Sure, the situation is quite different: when Apple entered the digital music player market, it was still in its infancy, and DMPs where not exactly mass-market products, while the cellphone market is huge, has been maturing for years, and there are some major players around, so Apple looks like the late-comer who just wants a slice of the pie.

But if you look closely, the iPhone is NOT a cellphone: it’s a PLATFORM. It’s like the PC all over again. Even if there already exist some cellphone platforms, like Symbian, Linux or Windows CE, they’re all extremely limited, if only because cellphone manufacturers are not in control. They have to do what the real masters want. And the real masters are the carriers. That’s probably why even if Nokia, Sony-Ericsson and Motorola have been making cellphones and cellphone OS for years, the results are still miserable.

Fast forward to March 6, 2008. What do we have now? We have a platform, the iPhone/iPod touch, with a mature and powerful OS, Mac OS X, and now the two missing pieces are brought to the puzzle: the software development kit and the way to distribute applications right to the cellphones.

Have you ever bought an app for your cellphone? Yeah I guessed so. I tried a couple of times for my old Sony Ericsson K700i (RIP), but the process involved browsing the web to find what I needed, go to some dubious-looking website, download a demo, copy it to my cellphone via Bluetooth, run the Java crapplet, find out it wasn’t what I needed, start over [ad lib]. The result: I never actually bought a single app for my phone.

Now what we have is a way for ANYONE to develop iPhone apps (just go to Apple.com, register for free with their Developper program, get the SDK and off you go), and for a modest $99/year fee, put them on Apple’s known and trusted iTunes Store, accessible by ANY iPhone owner out there on their phone, with no payment issue since it’s all handled though your iTunes Store account. It’s a no brainer: you buy apps for your iPhone as you would buy a track for your iPod.

And the SDK is not some crappy bizarre “iPhone-only” tool, it’s the good old Xcode, that every Mac developer is used to. But if you pay attention to what happened during the “event”, you’ll notice that there was a huge emphasis put on the fact that all the developers invited to try the SDK out and present what they did in less than two weeks had never developed for the Mac before. Apple really wants to advertise the iPhone as NOT a MacPhone, just like the iPod is NOT a MacPod. Look at an iPhone or iPod and the only visible branding is the Apple logo, you have to read the tiny print to learn that it was “designed by Apple”. Actually, the whole iPhone/iPod user interface has no resemblance whatsoever to MacOSX. So, that means Apple wants to make sure that ALL developers jump in on the iPhone platform bandwagon. Of course, Mac developers will get a headstart, since they know all about Objective-C, Cocoa and Xcode, hence the “look at what these non-Mac developers did in LESS THAN TWO WEEKS” mantra, meaning “you can do it too”.

And the whole idea of having people develpp iPhone apps using Xcode means that 1) they have to do it on a Mac, 2) they get familiar with Xcode and 3) they learn to use Objective-C, program in Cocoa etc. The result: you get non-Mac developers who actually get to master all the tools and techniques required to develop for the Mac. So why not do it then? It’s the Trojan Horse revisited.

I really think that Apple is onto something really big, something that might actually define a whole new market. As John Doerr, Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, said when he introduced the $100,000,000 iFund initiative:

Today we are watching history. That’s the launching of the iPhone SDK, the creation of the third great platform, the iPhone and iPod touch. [...] It’s bigger than the personal computer.

Fake Steve Jobs also nails if perfectly:

BlackBerry is dead. Microsoft is dead. Windows Mobile is dead. Amazon is dead. Kindle is dead. Nokia is dead. Motorola was already dead but now they are even more dead. Google’s Android is dead. Samsung is dead. LG is dead. Sony is dead. UTStarcom is dead. [...] UPDATE: In the list of the dead up above I forgot to mention Palm and Adobe. They are both also dead. So dead, in fact, that I forgot to mention them.

To paraphrase Apple’s double-page add when IBM introduced the IBM PC: “Welcome iPhone, seriously”.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 16:34 CET and is filed under Apple talk, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.