Apple’s Green Thumb
When Apple first introduced the iPhone they had a vision for it. Its hard drive would be stuffed with music and movies that you had bought from iTunes, and its Safari browser would be stuffed with iPhone optimized Web 2.0 applications. They were storming the walled gardens of mobile carriers’ mobile internet offerings.
The whole point of the iPhone was to keep Verizon and friends from selling music to their mobile customers. In order to do this Apple had to drive enough early adoption of the iPhone to change the entire dialectic of mobile music. This was managed by creating the best mobile internet device the world had seen. Full internet connectivity and the ability to keep all of your iTunes music on your phone killed the carriers’ gardens.
After a little bit, new iPhone owners realized that they didn’t actually have the internet in their pockets. Much of what they wanted to do on the web was locked up in flash applications. Since apple was not about to let un-vetted client side code run on iPhones, they were forced to build their own walled garden to implement an equivalent of Web 2.0 functionality.
Apple fought against this. They argued that anything that you wanted to do could be done with javascript. Except that what people wanted to do was play flash games that supported iPhone motion control. So Apple gave in and a million fart apps were born along with the iTunes app store.
I’m going to just shorten this part to say that the app store has proved lucrative for apple and provides an extra layer of device stickiness. If your iPhone breaks, you will buy a new iPhone because you don’t want to re-buy a hundred dollars of application software. Now with Apple taking control of mobile advertising in their garden they seem to be locking themselves into it for the long term.
Unfortunately for Apple, technological advances that make their garden redundant will cause users to chafe. It will not be long before someone does to Apple’s garden what Apple did to Verizon’s. Every ounce of effort spent trying to defend the wall is wasted. Apple would be better off preparing for the day their walls fall down. If Apple rolls out their streaming music service as expected later today at the WWDC event, we’ll get a hint at how grudgingly Apple will embrace this change. How externally prickly this service ends up being will let us know how hard Apple is fighting the inevitable internally. People don’t like to eat apples with thorns.
