Will Apple Dominate Next Gen Computing?

Duh! We’re designers, we use Macs, duh, yeah… of course we’d say that. Duh, hang on a minute, Alex Iskold over at RWW is going further than that, he’s saying Why Apple Will Dominate Next Gen Computing. Alex is probably the 16th cleverest person on the web, his posts always feature charts which make little or no sense to me, being as I am, an ‘overview’ rather than a ‘nuts n’bolts’ kind of a guy.

A choice quote:

“No matter how cool the exchange support and the enterprise play is, that news is dwarfed by the other, much more important announcement - the iPhone SDK. The powerful platform that Apple uses to create beautiful applications for MacOS and iPhone is now completely open. Over a decade in making, this Objective-C based stack is complete with interfaces for operating system, sockets, graphics, audio, motion control and UI components; just to name a few. The platform comes with complete iPhone simulator, XCode development environment and 1-click compile/build/deploy process. This platform is a game changer.

A premier venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins, agrees. They sent John Doerr to announce the 100 million dollar iFund, a fund to focus on iPhone startups. Mr. Doerr is one of the most well respected venture capitalists ever. He called the release historical and even claimed that the iPhone is bigger than the PC. Think about this, he said: a device that travels with you everywhere and brings the world’s information and applications to your finger tips. It is indeed a powerful thought.”

The majority of the comments tend to disagree, but they can’t really contest it, only retreat to ‘open source’ mountain and hurl rocks.

Fact is this is a game changing moment in mobile development and the App Store is just part of that, a true market disruptor in the same way the iTunes store is, or more importantly was back in it’s day.

In theory come June you can create an application for the iPhone, pay $99 to get it in the store and then set your price, Let’s posit $1 for a dating application that tells you when other iPhone users looking for love enter your area, let’s call it LoveStalker. Let’s say 1 million of Steve Jobs’ much vaunted 10 million iPhone users by the year end, buy LoveStalker, it’s got universal appeal, you download it and let it sit on your phone, it tells you when it’s time to smell your breath. Ok it’s a poop idea, but it’s potentially a $700,000 idea (Apple take 30%).

Then you port it to Google Android handsets and on and on… the age of mobile ubiquity is upon us.

Posted in Mobile, New Business Model | 1 Comment »