I am not sure about the licensing thing – Apple did try in the 90s on the desktop – but it fell flat and Jobs killed it when he rejoined. Maybe the lack of a decent competitor in the mobile world is a good reason to do it but I think it still assumes the balance of power is going to stay as it is.

The drawback I could see is that the more interested parties have a say in something the more fragmented and bloated it tends to become – this is essentially what happened to J2ME.

So Apple holding onto the HW and SW allows them to keep a more focussed approach and SJ can run his evil plan without having to negotiate with any other parties. Maybe he thinks in the long run they will own both areas as Nokia et al gets eaten by their focus on the hardware.

Who knows – if I did I could make a killing :-)

My problem with that: say you wrote a version of Donkey Kong for the iPhone. Why would I want to run that on my Mac. It would be like taking a ferrari to the shops. I can buy Halo4 instead. Basically my question is: what are the apps I would want to run on both machines? I can’t think of one I really want. In my own luddite mind I separate both computing worlds. The internet, now THAT’s what I want on my phone. I want to buy the iPhone for browsing, SMS and texting. But that’s about it. Am I a narrow-minded clod?

What I think Apple should do is get out of HW altogether. Nokia is desperate to get some decent SW and a nice OS. License the OS to phone makers! LG and Samsung can make the HW for cheap, and have no pretensions to owning the value chain. Make the Apple OS as ubiquitous on phone-like devices as MSFT is on PCs. Charge $50 for it, the HW commoditises — 100m smartphones a year in a couple years time, that’s a potential $5bn revenue, but at a super-duper margin, without any of that nasty hardware R&D.

I think I mentioned that in the other comment chain that it was a good idea. The more I think about it the more I think they should do it. What do you think, Steve?

It is not that it easier to write on the SDK (to be honest Objective-C is not that high up the popular languages list at present). It is that Apple and other developers can leverage this on all its offering simultaneously, which will also helps drive its PC uptake when the usefulness of this becomes apparent.

The struggle the phone manufacturers have is that they have no foothold in the PC and online markets at all and so are very limited in trying to compete in one dimension, while Apple can use its presence in PC/retail and online data environments to get a compelling integration offering in place while everyone else is trying to squeeze yet more megapixels out of their devices.

Granted not everyone wants this and not everyone can see the strength of it. I am probably wildly wrong here but it just looks so obvious to me I am surprised the telco analysts just don’t see it.
I think that the business world tends to see things in light of existing models and misses the sea change until it has happened all around them.

It sort of reminds me of the story about Gordon Moore at Intel who was so concerned about Motorola’s 68000 CPU features and the race to commoditisation that, when presented with the 8080-based destop PC concept by Ted Hoff and Stan Mazor, Moore said it was not a ‘serious’ computer and he could not see the point of it and pointed out that Intel would never be able to spend the time writing all the apps for it let alone provide the low cost screens and printers.

At the same time Jobs and Wozniak brought out the Apple II and Visicalc arrived and changed the game. Admittedly MS won the game by doing the IBM deal but I don’t think that is likely to repeat.

Moore was so focussed on the HW he could not see that for the user at some point HW features are not much of a difference it is the SW that counts and the same software on all your devices is a big pull through.

Linux just can’t provide this as I don’t think its penetration on the desktop will get much higher until some company manages to get the UI right. If only MS would adopt Linux then Apple would have some competition.

If so, while I don’t know my GUI from my BSD SDK (I am honestly impressed you do, though) , I would note that Esperanto is supposedly a much easier language to master than English, yet has never quite caught on.

If Nokia, Samsung, and everyone else took up Linux, so your addressable market is so much bigger, might you not bite the bullet and write your version of Donkey Kong in Linux, even though it is clunkier and will take longer and be more annoying?

I can see why eventually just looking at the phone dimension might miss the point, but I have been looking at this space for a while now, and have become very bored waiting for our mobile data computing future to be born. At the very least, I can foresee a lag from now until then.

You see, your argument viewed properly eventually comes down to the same as mine. You need a chicken to lay the egg. Apple needs to get its hardware scale as a phone down first before its SW advantages can truly come through.

20 years later we are seeing the backwash as people’s preferences at home are pushing their way into the business arena (hence the rise of Linux and OSX) so integration is becoming the key (and MS is losing ground rapidly as Vista is a car crash).

Most developers I know now use OSX or Linux machines, and OSX is gaining share because you can do pretty much everything Linux can but you are not forced to constantly deal with the ugly bits of the OS (You can also run XP in a VM if you need to).

Funnily I think that Nokia and RIM are both in a similar space now in the mobile device market to the place Apple were in the early PC market (see my first paragraph). And if they do not realise this now they will in a few years when they follow Moto down the pan.

As I said before Apple’s trick has been to take a stable and robust BSD foundation OS and apply a unified GUI that is pitched at the consumer and can ported to mobile/PC and desktop environments for a unified experience.

This is something that pretty much all Linux ditros are still struggling with (who wants to mess about with the insides of the OS when you don’t need to).

Additionally a reasonably unified SDK on the variants of the OS is a great cost saving as it makes it easy to produce mobile versions of desktop apps, without having to learn a whole new set of APIs or hire new dev teams.
The fragmented nature of Linux is going to make this a lot harder as even if Nokia adopts it for phones and achieves a decent UI layer they have no presence on the desktop and I can’t see how they can then leverage the device APIs in a meaningful way. This means 3rd party companies are going to have to have very different skills to write the same desktop and mobile SW. Google is also looking at this with Android and their Google apps projects.

I think the hardware is pretty much already at the commoditised stage (most phone parts are already from a variety of suppliers) it is how you put them together and the SW running on it that counts (i.e the iPod and the iPhone).

The carrier subsidizing the phones and bundling with voice packages is a reality at present but once the voice becomes a secondary function of the device and wireless is used for a lot urban voice traffic instead of the GSM network I think that the carriers will lose this control as AOL and Compuserve did with their initial control of the ISP market.

Like I said it is limiting to look at just the mobile phone dimension and project forwards just on that basis. It may be valid in the short term but as ramster said it is uncharted waters and as much as I think that Steve Jobs is an egomaniac he does seem to get it and you can see this in Apple’s overall strategy.

On the hardware side, we just have to wait for Moore’s law to kick in, in both handsets and even the wireless infrastructure (these days, 2/3 the cost of a wireless base-station is signal processing and other computing hardware). So we’re going to have a world of cheap hardware and huge wireless network capacity (from HSPA, 1xEVDO, LTE and mobile WiMAX). This is the landscape on which all these players are fighting. Given this, it’s hard to see how the SW won’t be the deciding factor.

Steve, what about Linux? I hear that Nokia is dumping Symbian, or at least thinking about it, and getting all Linux-y as a way of getting some more of the software edge that everyone says is the next frontier in mobile phones.

But Steve, let’s face it, iPhone IS a phone. It’s sold by phone companies with voice packages, subsidised like a phone, and they even call it a “phone”. Most people are going to spend most of the time they spend on it using it as a phone, jabbering away in trains saying loudly “I’m on a train!” It has some exciting bits that mean it is better than other phones at non-core tasks like web browsing. Phones have been about HW scale for ages. That may be about to change, maybe we are in a transition phase.

But if it does become all about the SW, won’t the HW eventually become commoditised? And then, won’t the winner in a commoditised HW space be 1) the player with the cost advantage, and 2) the one with the most open-source or freely available SW stuff, and the most apps?

Apple may not do well in that environment. It didn’t in PCs. Would a Nokia-Linux combo be the best horse to bet on?

Apple has provided something that is missing from the mobile space – which is a decent OS platform/SDK combination for third-party developers to use. A similar state change that Microsoft initially provided on the PC.

JavaME on the handset is poor and so fragmented that it is a nightmare to develop anything useful to run on more than one phone model. Symbian is similarly a poor development platform. Current APIs also suffer badly from not only vendor lockdown but also further carrier control of the firmware versions available so that the same models on different carriers are restricted to different firmware versions.

This is why there are so few decent mobile apps. The manufacturers (Nokia included) still think of things in terms of phone hardware, as do the carriers. This lack of experience in the wider PC software ecosystem has severely limited both their ambition and innovation, which both Apple and Google (with Android) have identified.

Apple has seen that a multi-platform strategy that targets desktop,mobile and the consumer space simultaneously is the way forward as data and SW become seamlessly portable beween environments in a way that isn’t easy with the PC/Phone separation we currently have.

Uptake of the next set of mobile devices will be driven by software not yet more powerful cameras, and in this Nokia and the others have a lot to learn from Apple and Google, as their own offerings to third party developers are just not strong enough to provide a reasonable user experience.

This is something that RIM has capitalised heavily on – but I think a number of competing Exchange integration applications on the iPhone and Android will remove the main driver for the Blackberry’s success, as has happened previously when generalised software capable devices become prevalent in a previously limited function device market

trick is doing HW and SW together with scale. Some of these guys have HW edges. Some have scale. I said and still think that AAPL has a SW edge.

Some say MSFT actually SAVED Apple’s arse in DT OS in the mid 1990s. That’s really why AAPL didn’t get crushed by MSFT OS — the antitrust case.

Oz, I have seen HW scale come through in a virtuous cycle in loads of industries. PNDs, Dongles, iPods, phones, NBs, NW equipment (CSCO, Alcatel, Ericsson) — wherever you have a large dominant player or duopoly in an tech HW industry, that’s pretty much how they got there.

The difference in the desktop market is that buying an iMac isn’t necessarily disadvantaging yourself – not only is leopard software exceptional, but with the addition of bootcamp you can run all the windows versions of the software if you wish anyway. I would agree with you that 5-10 years ago it was a virtuous cycle, hence the dominance of the windows OS.

Virtuous cycles don’t allow choice for the rational customer; they necessitate.

You’re betting on Nokia, Sony, & Samsung, all hardware companies, to defeat Apple in the software arena?

Particle, no it isn’t.

Rhamster, you argument is a fine one, clearly some R&D dollars are more efficient than others. But it’s sort of built into my argument –you are also right that Nokia is a fantastic company, where GM was a near total monopoly in a captive domestic market. Also the oil shock may have helped get Honda (Toyota is an equal or a better case) get a foothold, which is another nail in the coffin your example deserves to lie in.

As for your Sony example, iPods are a completely different case, a new category which Apple eneterd at the same time as others and reinvented. Mobile phones and PDA-smartphones have been around for a long time.

I can almost guarantee you Apple will trade at a price premium anyway vs a similarly specced Nokia.

Your best point, the one I have the hardest time defeating, is about the SW. There I have to grant you an advantage, and there Nokia and HTC and Samsung and Sony Ericsson and LG and the rest will have to work really hard, and 1 or other of them won’t make it. That’s what’s given Apple its “in” in handsets, and that’s why they have a chance now.

My only issue is that too too many people think it is a done deal already, and we are only at the start of the battle.