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Comment by icarus_drowning | Hacker News Reader

This is a fair point, but its a fair point that completely misses the point. If RIM wants to attract the huge numbers of developers that are flocking to iOS (and, presumably, doing all of their dev work in OS X), they should be doing everything possible to make the switch from iOS development to Playbook development as smooth as possible. And there is no way to do that without addressing the question of Playbook development on OS X.

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Maybe they want to attract the huger-still number of developers who aren't flocking to iOS. It's obvious they won't get the rock star developers, but there's a lot more non-rock stars. How is the experience on Windows?

The question is: do they want to compete with Apple for developers? Given Apple's huge success, I can't see how the answer to that question could be anything but "yes".

If RIM's strategy doesn't have some component that involves trying to woo iOS developers to their platform, I predict they will fail.

At the risk of sounding xkcd-esque, what is your definition of "fail"? I agree that RIM attempting to duplicate Apple's consumer-focused strategy is unlikely to yield Apple-like results in terms of market share and immediate profit, but let's remember that that's not where RIM started out. There's always a lot of money to be made in B2B, which just happens not to be the competition's strong point.

Finally, the whole smartphone area is ten years old, consumer-focused part of it less than five years old: less than mature, and way less than settled. In another ten years, this all might have turned out to be a silly bubble as Moore's law erases any effective differences between smartphones. Will Apple "fail" when its percentage profit per device and market share falls to current Macbook values?

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