It's good to be king

Why do companies, at the height of their power, lose their edge? How does a company transition from an industry leader to a stale leviathan? Can you put your finger on that moment? Consider Apple. Great marketing company. Great at identifying core customer wants and needs. Great design.

But what about how they take for granted, and even abuse, some of the people directly responsible for their success? Interesting business model Apple has. Are people really okay with this? Consider the following articles.

From Wired:
"For Apple, Yesterday’s Banned Apps Are Tomorrow’s Great New Feature" by Eliot Van Buskirk
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/for-apple-yesterday%E2%80%99s-banned-apps-are-tomorrow%E2%80%99s-great-new-feature#

"But the army of developers who have created over half a million Apple iOS apps to date perform another valuable function, in addition to making Apple’s hardware more attractive to users and contributing 30 percent of their revenue to the company’s bottom line: Sometimes, they act like a big, unpaid R&D lab for incubating features that Apple can eventually incorporate into its own products — even after banning those same products from its app store (or, rather, App Store)."

The article goes on to describe a couple examples of jerking developers around while stealing their work.

The most egregious example was the WiFi sync feature that Apple recently implemented. From the article: "According to The Register, Apple asked Hughes for his resume while rejecting his app, but really, there was no need to hire him. They could incorporate his app — and even its name and, more or less, his logo — without paying him a cent."


And here is a more personal account of how Apple's smugness manifests itself. To be fair, I don't know how much of this is attributable to Apple. These are two related articles from Violet Blue, about her experiences at WWDC 2011 (Apple Worldwide Developers Conference).

First, from ZDNet.com:
"WWDC 2011: No Innovation From Apple, Developer Discontent" by Violet Blue
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/wwdc-2011-no-innovation-from-apple-developer-discontent/428?tag=content;search-results-rivers

"WWDC 2011 lacked innovation and exemplified a monoculture that casts the closing of Apple’s Jobs-era legacy in a light of exclusivity, hostility, and heartfelt angst among those who felt that Apple’s core strength was in its elevation of outsider thought."


And a link from Violet Blue's website, Tiny Nibbles. This is NSFW (that's "not safe for work" for all you kids out there) due to the nature of Violet Blue's website. Nothing objectionable about the article itself but some of the images on her site might offend.

"Don’t Bring An iPhone To A Gunfight: by Violet Blue
http://www.tinynibbles.com/blogarchives/2011/06/dont-bring-an-iphone-to-a-gunfight.html

"I saw these encounters as examples of the growing monoculture in the Apple community. They represent the crushing sense I have that Apple has entered a new era. After Apple felt entitled to purge their developer community after building a market off their backs – in the interest of making 'innovation' an externality, maybe because it’s cheaper than health benefits – fratty white males of a certain age have come to symbolize the hostility to the 'outsider' that will limit Apple in the years to come."

"For a company that’s always aimed to celebrate the outsider, that’s more than just disappointing. It’s the deepest betrayal of their customer base. My experiences illustrate Apple’s now-institutionalized disconnect with the people who built their products, their loyal fans, and the customers they claim to serve."

"WWDC 2011 lacked innovation and exemplified a monoculture that casts the closing of Apple’s Jobs-era legacy in a light of exclusivity, hostility, and heartfelt angst among those who felt that Apple’s core strength was in its elevation of outsider thought."