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In the video, Jobs says he feels their pain. The developers laugh. It's kind of strange to laugh about your own pain that way.
Of course this was completely following the classic roadmap for Steve that Doc Searls published here in 1997. "The influence of developers, even influential developers like you, will be minimal. The influence of customers and users will be held in even higher contempt." The disconnect is the developer didn't care so much about what Avie was doing, not nearly as much as he cared what he was doing, which was now lost. A few years before that, I was working on system-level scripting for the Mac, and had developed a toolkit, with the help of Don Park, that made it easy for apps to call each other as if they were a system-level toolkit. Just like the Mac OS. So a database could provide services to a comm program, or more likely to a user who wanted to integrate comm with database (this was before communication was integrated in everything through the TCP stack). Shortly after coming out with my toolkit Apple announced theirs, in vapor, but I had learned the lesson before about competing with the platform vendor on plumbing, so as painful as it was, I adapted my product and made it work with Apple's approach. Then, as a skilled Silicon Valley networker, I put together lots of little deals with other developers to make our products work together. Until one day, all the deals went kaput. I called these people, many of whom I considered friends, and was told that Apple had made deals with each of them that precluded them working with my company. They all took the deals. (And violated NDA's by telling me. Amazingly Apple had expected none of them to tell me why they were walking away from our collaborations.) A few years later, I asked a room full of them, just out of curiosity, if any of them had made money on this deal they did with Apple. Of course not. Apple, Microsoft and Aldus (which later became part of Adobe) made all the money.
This is the famous Prisoner's Dilemma. It applies not only to prisoners but also to independent software developers. The police in the analogy are the platform vendor. And the prisoners are the developers. Today, in the area where I'm working, the equivalent of Apple is Twitter. They're doing one-off deals with developers, and imho again the ones who will do well are the big companies with large installed bases. The ones who will lose, even if they get a deal with Twitter, are the small guys. And most of them will not get deals with Twitter. Most of them won't even get close. My advice to developers who seek partnerships with Twitter is to spread your bets out. Sure, Twitter may buy one or two of you, but what if they buy your competitor? Would you like to have some hope for the future if that should happen? If you get a knock on the door from someone who's too small to put you out of business on a whim, don't think about how small they are, think about how small you are. You're much more likely to be able to trust someone who has to work with you rather than someone who doesn't. |
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The bottom-line is that the developers would have done better, imho, working with each other, than each of them making separate "deals" with Apple. Because to Apple, they weren't deals at all. Their motive, as people, not so much as a company, was to regain full control of everything that happened on their platform. The other developers helped them do that. Once that was over, they weren't important to Apple. Even if, as individuals, the Apple people had integrity and honor, the company didn't. People move around all the time. Leave the company. Get reorg'd. The new guys, if there's any memory of the "deal" didn't feel obligated to honor it. 