Comment by Tyrannosaurs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tyrannosaurs | Hacker News Reader

Joel Spolsky spoke about this on the SO podcast a while back in terms of people who develop extensions for Visual Studio (though it extends to all IDEs and indeed a lot of software).

He described certain applications as grabbing nickels from the path of an on-coming steamroller. Effectively what he was saying was that there are things which are going to be added to products eventually and while there is money to be made by getting there first, the developer needs to accept that it's inevitable that they're going to be ploughed down eventually.

But this isn't just Apple and it's not just iOS, it's software and in particularly operating systems everywhere (or does someone want to tell me that the differences between Windows 1.0 and Windows 7 hasn't impacted on any developers anywhere?).

If your business model is taking what someone else does and doing it just a tiny bit better this comes with the territory. You either need to live with that or keep doing it better so they don't catch up.

Marco Arment wrote a piece on how he didn't care about a rumoured forthcoming addition to iOS despite it competing with Instapaper because he felt he could bring more to it than Apple would and in fact it might bring him new customers by raising awareness of this sort of feature.

If you're not thinking that then I'm sorry to say that your product really wasn't strong enough or different enough in the first place for it to be anything other than a short term venture.

> (or does someone want to tell me that the differences between Windows 1.0 and Windows 7 hasn't impacted on any developers anywhere?)

Actually I think Microsoft is partly responsible for the sense of self-righteous indignation that developers have when they get displaced. They deliberately held back on introducing even basic features into Windows for a remarkably long time. Things like anti-virus, paint programs, text editors, photo management - even opening zip files - were left with token or no support for 5 to 10 years after they were no brainers in terms of expected or useful functionality. Of course, MS had (and still has, though less so) a regulatory threat to worry about that nobody else does.

Google's regulatory threat is probably stronger now, although Apple is looking to control more of the user's interaction with their product. I think Apple gets away with it because their spread makes sense to regulators: They make the product, make the software to make it work, and provide the services to make it useful. That makes sense to regulators in a way that integrating a browser with the operating system didn't, even though it's the exact same thing.

> Apple gets away with it because their spread makes sense to regulators

I'm not sure it's that. I think it's just that their strategy of only ever targeting the top 20% most profitable customers means they never broach market shares that make them a threat to competition by the conventional measures used by regulators.

I think you're right, there. By focussing on the high end, they likely avoid any accusation of monopoly and so avoid anti-trust investigations. That they approach a monopoly on the markets they target doesn't really matter if their market share in total is <10%.

Apple steamrolls over 3rd party apps (including implementing features that they rejected another app for including), developers get angry and... this is somehow this is partly Microsoft's fault. Interesting.

No, we're saying that suggesting that this is something that only Apple do is wrong - most large software companies do it.

Well, the poster I was replying to was kind of saying the opposite. Implying that Microsoft 'spoiled' developers by not implementing those things themselves.

Actually you're right, he is.

That's... odd.

There's sort of a point there but MS dropped that approach a good many years ago (look at security centre, movie maker and so on) so I'm not sure it's really relevant today.

> look at security centre, movie maker and so on

Even still, anti-virus and movie maker are not default installs (and not even delivered on the install media) which is at least partly attributable to MS still being hesitant to cross that line.

I seem to have movie maker installed and I certainly didn't download it.

Possibly it came down in a Windows Update (I tend to just say "everything") but if that's the case it's surely only the finest of whiskers away from being a default install.

I guess there's a kind of double meaning of "responsible" at work here. I didn't mean to suggest MS was wrongful in their actions - what they did they did for their own purely business oriented reasons and it worked well for them. It just happened that it resulted in a perception that there is an invisible line between an OS and its apps that an OS vendor won't cross and that if you establish a business on one side of the line you can trust that the OS vendor won't squash you. That line was never real, it just happened that Microsoft couldn't cross it for business & regulatory reasons, so they didn't. But now we come to MacOS and iOS and Apple has no qualms about crossing the line but developers still seem to expect them not to. I attribute that partly to this historical perception that came from the MS era.

  > because he felt he could bring more to it
  > than Apple would

Until his next update is rejected because it duplicates functionality that iOS already provides and would 'confuse' consumers (so could you please stop attempting to compete with us, please?).

It's been pointed out on the other thread, but this tends to happen when iOS had the functionality first, not the other way round. Apple allows plenty of camera apps and other such "duplicated functionality" to remain in the app store.

That may be, but it becomes something of an 'unenforced law,' which is something that I'm not very fond about. If the terms of service allow them to boot that App at any time (but for the time-being they are going with an interpretation that is favorable to you), then you are still on shaky ground.

In theory Apple can reject any app it deems unfit for iOS without further explanation. So can any door keeper for that matter.

This is just like the time Apple integrated social networking into iTunes and killed Facebook and Twitter.

which is even more amazing since Facebook killed Google, ergo Apple killed Google.

Checkmate!

I think you right, companies like Devexpress and JetBrains who develop .NET controls, add-ons seems like doing great. They are making money by being one step ahead and they always will be, therefore developers will keep spending money to resharper even though VS.NET 2010 comes with refactoring features.

If you are willing to be more agile than the vendor you'll always have something, but if all you do provide something basic which can be simple replaced by the vendor, then yes, all you can do milk it as much as you can until vendor get there. (and for small project, one-man shops even this makes a lot of sense)

And ironically his company produces a bug tracker/version control for Windows. Do you think any of the developers inside MSFT see the need for a bug tracker/version control system that integrates with visual studio? Do you think it's on anyones roadmap?

I assume you're being sarcastic, right? Microsoft has offered this for years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Foundation_Server

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