Robi Ganguly’s Big Ideas

Windows support.

That’s right, they should support Windows – for developers.

What Apple is doing with its App Store and the iPhone OS revisions is creating the market for developers who create and sell mobile apps… on Apple’s platform of course. Learning from the PC battles, they’ve quite obviously focused on the idea that more apps = more ways to meet consumer needs and therefore, it should result in more revenue for Apple from their primary customers: Consumers.

Given that dynamic, it makes very little sense that only those with Apple machines (and yes, some folks on Unix/Linux..) can develop iPhone applications. Since the predominant operating system is Windows, doesn’t it make sense that you should support all of the developers who are on Windows? (I know, I know, since when does Apple make sense to anyone but themselves?)

In all of the blogs and reporting covering the lead-up to today’s announcement, I’ve been pretty shocked that this issue hasn’t been turned into a larger piece of the conversation. Apple’s addressable developer market is MUCH smaller than it could be. Ultimately, the other players in the market are all going to be competing for developers alongside Apple.  Although Apple’s device and platform might be much better, if they’re not supporting Windows developers, they won’t be tapping into the largest pool of developers.

What’s really interesting about this glaring lack of Windows support is how easily we can draw parallels between this situation and previous Apple products and their associated growth. If we just pull up the unit sales charts for the iPod and for Mac computers over the past several years we can point to inflection points that coincided with providing support for Windows.

Here, take a look at the iPod sales chart:

On October 16, 2003, Apple announced the release of iTunes for Windows, which meant that Windows PC owners could now purchase and manage their iPods (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/oct/16itms.html).  I’ve highlighted that quarter above and while I won’t say it was the ONLY thing that led to a change in the iPod’s sales trajectory, it certainly would appear to have coincided with a new sales trend. Up until that point in time, the iPod was really just a blip on the MP3 market radar.

Next, let’s take a look at the sale of Mac Computers:

During the first week of April, 2006, Apple announced that it would release a piece of software it called “Bootcamp” on its Intel-powered computers. Bootcamp was meant to enable the use of Microsoft Windows on Macs, a pretty wild idea at the time. I decided to purchase some Apple stock, based on that announcement, hypothesizing that it would increase the addressable market for Apple computers and boost their sales. Taking a look at the absolute growth in units sold, that hypothesis has been proven out nicely ☺ (note, I no longer own that stock).

I want to be clear: I don’t think it’s fair to attribute either iPod or Mac sales growth solely to Windows-related accessibility. Instead, I’d like to suggest that being accessible via Windows is clearly beneficial and could prove to be transformative to Apple’s ultimate goal: iPhone and iPhone-related sales.

As an investor, an iPhone owner and someone who’s working on mobile app development, I look forward to the day when Apple looks at these realities and agrees with me .

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