Yearly Archives: 2013

New Tech Means New Winners

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Chris Dixon wrote a very smart piece on mobile this weekend. A lot of the things he talked about are things I’ve talked about. One I haven’t talked about as much, but have been thinking about, is based on this excerpt:

If you go back and look at the history of productivity apps you’ll see that each major user interface shift led to new classes of productivity apps.

Actually, each generation of technology has meant a new winner, not just new apps. In the hardware days, it was HP calculators. In the DOS prompt days it was Lotus 1-2-3. In the mouse days it was Excel. Something will dominate in the touch era.

Same is true for word processing. In the DOS days it was Wordperfect and in the mouse days it was Word.

Hardware’s Impact on Software Pricing

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There has been a lot of discussion lately on app prices and the ability to price sustainably in the App Store. Michael Jurewitz has a nice 5-part series on the basics starting here, Marco Arment discussed it (and I rebutted), and Ben Thompson wrote about subscriptions (where I also added my two cents).

I have been contemplating another factor, though, in average software prices: the price of hardware. When systems cost thousands of dollars, spending a few hundred per title was no big deal. In those days, I believe, Lotus 1-2-3 was somewhere around $400. But as the systems dropped in price so did software prices. The Office suite went from $200 per app to $200 for four apps, and then the basics (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) were available for  $100 (Home and Student edition).

The same is true for mobile software. When devices were $500-1000 spending $30-100 for a software product was no big deal. But now smartphones are free to $200 (user perspective, with contract). The expected price of software also dropped. Now high end prices are $4.99. Furthermore, I believe this effect is only pertinent for traditional software purchases, those one-off buys that made up the software world all those years. Other models may be immune.

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There have always been very expensive software packages as well, mostly because there was either limited competition or aimed at a niche that would pay or both.

How Different Would iOS Development Be If Apple Hadn’t Given In To Native Apps?

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Steve Jobs, in 2007, stood on stage and announced the iPhone. Developers everywhere drooled. We all wanted to write apps for this thing. After all it was the smartphone we had all dreamed of. But there was no discussion at all of a developer toolkit. Afterward someone must have asked. I remember the shockwaves reverberating through the developer community when it was announced there wouldn’t be one.

Well, less than a year later, we had a developer toolkit and the race to develop native apps was on. Even I recognized, someone who had done very little web development, that in some ways that was a huge step backward. Of course few of us discussed it at the time. We were too busy rushing to get our apps in the App Store.

As I now dig into HTML5 — and am loving every second of it — I can’t help but wonder what would have been different if Apple had stuck to their guns. What if Apple had stuck with that initial proclamation? What if the only tools we had, as developers, was web apps? What would be different today?

I started a list.

  • Access to a wider array of sensors via JS
  • Other devices would be more standards compliant to keep up with Apple
  • Extra JS libraries to bridge to Apple’s graphics packages
  • No App Store, possibly better ways to market our apps?
  • More websites that have pretty icons when you save them to your home screen
  • Monetization provided by Apple like Stripe or Braintree, leaving us to have an actual customer relationship
  • Universal logins
  • More developers doing web (meaning open) development, able to develop both local and server solutions
  • Native code (C/C++) in more browsers
  • Much of the same code (responsive) would run on Mac, Windows and mobile
  • Better usage analytics
  • Much better JS animations

Have any to add?

Left Behind

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In late 2007, we started working on a web based version of powerOne. We started learning Rails on the back end and HTML and CSS on the front. Soon we would have dug into Javascript.

Then Apple announced its SDK and all web-based work, except marketing and a small amount of back end work stuff, like the library, went out the window. We shifted all of our focus to learning native iOS (at that time called iPhone). We got pretty good at it, too, especially for productivity style apps. And of course the work we did on powerOne was popular. We’ve had over 1.5 million downloads, not bad for a productivity tool.

But here I am six years later learning JS, HTML and CSS. The technology is amazing. I’ve never developed with anything so immediate in my life. It is magical to run a command in the console and see it immediately react in the browser window. No compilation time, no waiting on the simulator and debugger. And the basics, especially when using something like jQuery, is actually pretty easy.

Maybe it wasn’t the same back then. After all, Internet Explorer was still way behind on compatibility, there was no jQuery Mobile, HTML5 was really just rolling out. I can’t complain about my timing. But the frustration over not being better versed at such an amazing technology is palpable for me. I wish I would have done more of this earlier.

Tackle The Impossible

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Albert Wenger, inspiring me this morning:

It is not about building a smoother version of what already exists in the market. That is a transient advantage as existing companies (in banking, insurance, healthcare, etc) adopt technology. If you want to build something big and lasting you have [to] use the internet/mobile to do something that simply was not possible before (at least not at any meaningful scale).

I turn 40 this year. I’m tired of futzing around with the little stuff.