[FoRK] $100M for iPhone Developers

[Luis Villa]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 11:50 AM, Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> wrote:
>
>  On Mar 7, 2008, at 9:57 AM, Luis Villa wrote:
>
>
> > Fair. I guess I don't see it as qualitatively new, or maybe more
>  > precisely the only thing I see as qualitatively new is the
>  > web-browsing experience, and that qualitative lead won't last, since
>  > it is based on delivery of standards-based content.
>
>  One other bit:
>
>  If you look at the iPhone as a bullet list of features, there's not
>  really any one thing that's fundamentally new other than multi-touch,
>  which IMHO is as a feature a bit overhyped.  But that's not the
>  point;  the qualitatively new thing is the sum of many incrementally-
>  improved "old hat" features.  The bet is that this collection of
>  incremental improvements achieves a kind of synergistic critical mass,
>  and that this whole is a qualitatively different thing than the sum of
>  its parts.

Agreed that that is probably true. Certainly it is true of OSX, which
finally seems to be getting some critical mass in the non-elite
consumer market.

My guess is that we'll see the same thing happen in both markets over
time- Apple will do better and better in terms of HW sales, but that
developing just for the Apple platform will be seen as a niche, and
that much higher volumes will be seen in cross-platform (mostly web)
development.

Luis

P.S. Slightly tangential, but is it just me, or are we starting to see
slightly better uptake in Linux consumer applications? Amazon's Linux
mp3 downloader just came out; Second Life client is moving out of
alpha on Linux, Adobe continuing to pledge AIR for Linux, etc.
Possibly just anecdotal at this point?