Archive for the ‘iPhone OS 4.0’ tag
Steve Jobs embraces digital communications
In the past few weeks we’ve seen something new from Steve Jobs: an interest in communicating with “the commoners” using digital communications channels like email and blogging. First, it was the email he sent in reply to a developer about the iPhone OS 4.0 release and then last week it was a letter on the corporate website, talking about Flash. Now, I haven’t looked into this extensively, but it seems to me that he’s taking a bit more of an open stance towards communicating with the world at large about Apple decision-making.
Importantly, the letter on the Adobe issue was indicative of his interest in communicating with developers about what’s going on behind the scenes. The Jobs who lost the PC developer war to Microsoft refused to do this. It looks like he might have learned a few things. I highly recommend reading the entire letter from Jobs, but in particular, this paragraph is highly informative. For those of you looking to understand the strategy Apple’s employing and how they think about their business, here it is, quite concisely (emphasis on the devices piece is mine):
Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.
And just for a bit of fun, if I was on the team at Apple really focused on the developer platform and its adoption, this might be my theme song right about now:
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