Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Apple quickly realized that apps would one day overtake .coms. They knew that mobile devices would overtake PCs.

Indeed. Which is why they spend a full year denying that the iPhone needed native apps and trying to shut down all the jailbreak work before finally caving and shipping an SDK with the next rev of the hardware.

Apple got lucky with the iPhone; it was the right product at the right time, and the App Store was a once-a-decade gold rush. But it certainly wasn't in Jobs' master plan for world domination.

I kept looking for insight in this article and not finding any.

View on HN

I'm glad someone else shared my opinion, I found "Apple quickly realized that apps would one day overtake .coms." to be a particularly absurd thing to say. When placed in context of the entire article it made more sense seeming as though the piece was on a whim (or possibly a dream/fantasy) rather then hard evidence or a deep understanding of our industry and culture.

The best part is how he says it in past-tense as if it has already happened.

glad someone else caught this. I actually read it over twice and chocked it up to being a type...not impressed at all.

Apple released the SDK 8 months after the iPhone 2G launch. That's not an unreasonable amount of time. I think their intent was always to allow third party applications but they wanted to produce a really good SDK first and not rush something to market. This is one of the reasons the iPhone App Store has been so successful.

"Apple got lucky with the iPhone"

Yeah,that Jobs just gets lucky ... again and again and again and again. He's like the energizer bunny of luck.

Or.

The weird part is his overall thesis is at least not bad. But then the article is just a long string of misinformation arriving at a somewhat accurate conclusion.

It's got post-hoc reasoning written all over it.

>I kept looking for insight in this article and not finding any.

It's in the last sentence: Disclosure: Long AAPL. This guy stands to gain (in reputation and wealth) by talking up Apple's value. That doesnt mean he's necessarily wrong, it just means that everything he says needs to be viewed through that lens.

Also, Apple makes up the vast majority of his tech stock coverage: http://seekingalpha.com/author/jason-schwarz/articles/latest

Yeah, this is ridiculous because all the cool apps in the world can't overcome the fact that they are only available on a single device. What makes web applications great is the platform and location agnostic nature of them.

I think that you are correct. This is why I expect HTML 5 "apps" to be more important on iPhone, Android phones, etc.

Pardon my somewhat non-techy understanding of this, but how do you see HTML 5 changing that? I am not familiar enough to understand the implications.

HTML5, if 'fully' supported by browsers (like Safari and Chrome), supports a bunch of new features that make previously impossible stuff easily doable - the major one being offline storage. e.g: GMail can store your inbox in your browser's offline storage cache, so you can continue to use the site and send/read emails just like you do with Outlook or other mail clients today. When you reconnect to the web, it'll sync up and send the differences.

App coolness is not a function of the number of devices it runs on.

a) people probably buy iPhones because of specific cool apps that are available on it (similar to the battle between the 3 game consoles)

b) an iPhone user doesn't care whether the cool app they love run on a Crackberry. I suspect Android users also don't care if an app they love doesn't work on an iPhone.

This is certainly true for apps that take advantage of the hardware. The thing is, a lot of apps out there just encapsulate web functionality inside an app so for those not so much.

Interesting to see people who think that SDK was not planned from the very start.

And there was no luck involved with the iPhone—remember, the thing was in the works for 2.5 years before being revealed. High focus on something you want to perfect is hardly a luck.

"They knew that mobile devices would overtake PCs." For productivity work, people usually prefer to remain stationary and use monitors larger than 4". They are not competing products. Ludicrous.

I'm not terribly impressed with the article.

But I think the no native apps thing had to do with control, which reinforces the Apple World thing. But it shouldn't be a surprise that Apple is aiming to be vertical monopoly - that's been it's model for years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com