Apple Targeting Business World for the iPhone

The New York Times is running a couple of stories about the future of the iPhone in the business world and Apple's plan to maintain control of application development. Now that the iPhone SDK has been released and the "App store" has been demonstrated, Steve Jobs is pushing for the adoption of the iPhone as a standard business tool. In addition, a venture capitalist named John Doerr has launched a $100 million "iFund" to spur development of applications for the iPhone. From the NYTimes: "Mr. Jobs was upfront that there are limitations on what applications can do. He talked about bans on pornography and malicious programs. He also said Apple will not allow any application to be installed on the machine other than through the iTunes store. Nor will applications be permitted that enable an end run around Apple's deals with wireless carriers. Many questions remain unanswered. How much streaming video will Apple allow, because the iPhone is such an interesting video device? Mr. Jobs did say that the application development environment will have a lot of capabilities for video playback. Will Apple allow a service like Last.FM to offer streaming music on the iPhone?"

Comments

Re:What Apple is doing

[OS24Ever]

First off, I'm not trolling, but come on, this response clearly is.

So my troll responses:

That's some great crack your smoking. Or is that in Soviet Russia where you think this will happen?

Or is it the

Step 1: iPhone takes over the market
Step 2: someone makes an 'open' device
Step 3: ???
Step 4: PROFIT! (oh wait, we give everything away, what?)

I mean, open devices took over the iPod market share quickly...oh wait.

So, now that I got that out of my system I'd like to point out a few issues with your starry eyed response from a hardened cynical 36 year old who has two kids to feed, a mortgage (with a regular 30 year loan thank you), and a few other bills to pay, and likes shiny gadgets to play with.

in otherwords, I need ot make money to get the things I like, because cars aren't free, homes aren't free, and the materials to make them aren't free. Someone expects to be compensated for their work.

So to CYA, I'm speaking of my own personal opinions using examples from my employment.

I work for big blue, I'm in hardware engineering these days. I interact with some of our largest customers on a weekly basis in an effort to get their feedback on what they like/don't like about our stuff and try to convince our really smart people why making something easy to do, or automatable, or whatever is a great idea while at the same time not trying to chase what people want, but try and predict it. I love my job, it's a lot of fun to try and do that and you're not always right, but when you are, it's pretty fun to be right.

I get paid to do that. We use 'open' technology such as Intel or AMD processors, 'industry standard' memory, 'industry standard' chipsets, and we try to put our spin on them to add value so that people will buy our stuff.

We've got competitors who do the same, and others who buy a bunch of crap, slap it in a box and call it a cheap computer and appeal to the 'cheap' vs 'innovation'. Personally, I don't like that. It encourages people to be lazy, not learn much, and just slap crap together made somewhere else and not promote science, math, and all those 'hard' subjects at schools and promotes the slimier legal, MBA, and what not fields. But I get off topic.

If you compare those two companies, one is 'encumbered' by employing PHDs, Masters of Engineering, Computer Science, all that stuff. Because there's an 'open' architecture out there and you could just buy parts from all sorts of people, put it in a metal box, and point at it as a computer.

Sure, that appeals to a few people, and Dell is a great #3 vendor in servers to prove that. Depending on which marketing guy you talk to HP and IBM trade between #1 and #2 depending on what countries & products they count. But, they're more expensive, and they have 'proprietary' solutions (Thinking along the lines of Blade servers especially, but AIX or HP-UX isn't open, neither is Tandem or Mainframes)

They make a lot of money on those 'closed' systems, and while Dell came along and got some of the business in the repeat buyers that buy servers in the 100s or 1000s at a time typically HP or IBM wins because the 'proprietary' stuff they add benefits the customer without burdening the customer with cost.

Maybe it's power usage savings, thermal output savings, managing 100s of nodes simply through a single interface, whatever the reason people continue to buy these things that cost more, sometimes with 98% of the same parts on the inside.

30%. that's a big number on the outside. But sometimes that's the price difference between a Dell and an IBM or HP box. That's not a small number either.

But, people pay it. Why? Maybe that 30% difference saves them 28% total of the 3 or 5 year they own that box because with their tools they can manage 50% more systems per person, or some other measurement like they save $1.0M a year in power costs on that 50,000 server web farm so it makes more sense to buy the more expensive initial