Rallying the Base

This week was WWDC 2011. Last year I was lucky enough to attend what appears to be the final stevenote. This year I followed along online, like much of Silicon Valley. There are a lot of reasons why so many of us who work in the tech world pay such close attention to the WWDC keynote. This is the place where Apple typically unveils innovative hardware and software. However, this year's event reminded me of another  watershed moment in recent US history: John McCain choosing Sarah Palin as his VP candidate back in 2008.

These two events were similar because they were both examples of rallying the base. In 2008, McCain decided against trying to appeal to moderate Republican/Democrats/independents who were either inclined to vote for Obama or undecided. Instead he went with Palin, a candidate who did not appeal to those people. The idea was to appeal to the most conservative elements of the Republican party and get those people to vote instead of staying home for whatever reason. Obviously this did not work.

So how was WWDC 2011 a rallying of the base tactic? Apple did not try to introduce near software or hardware that would get non-iPhone owners to go out and buy an iPhone or more strongly consider buying an iPhone the next time they were in the market for a new phone. Instead they did their best to make sure that current iPhone owners continued to buy iPhones. The strategy was two-fold.

First, they needed the places where they were weak and other were strong. Now let's be honest here, by others we are talking about Android/Google. There were a couple of glaring problems with iOS 4. First was notifications, so Apple essentially adopted Android's model here. Second was the dependency on iTunes the desktop software application. They introduced wireless sync and their iCloud initiatives to address this weakness. Apple did not break any new ground in any of these areas, they simply removed some obvious reasons for people to buy an Android device over an iPhone.

Phase two of rallying the base was to increase lock-in. If you are an iPhone user, you already experience lock-in. Buying an Android phone means losing all of your apps and games. Depending on what you use for email, calendar, etc. you might also lose that data too. Of course this is true to some degree about any smartphone platform. However, with the expansion of the Android Market (I've seen many projections that it will be bigger than the App Store soon), pretty much every app or game you have on your iPhone can be found on Android. Further, there's a good chance that it will be free on Android, even if you had to pay for it on the iPhone. Further, with the popularity of web based email, especially GMail, you probably would not lose any emails, calendar events, etc. So the lock-in was not as high as Apple needed it to be. Enter iCloud and iMessaging.

As many have noted, iCloud/iMessaging does not offer anything that you could not get from 3rd party software. Syncing your docs, photos, email, calendar, etc. is something that many of us already do, and that includes iPhone users. Further many folks already have IM clients that do everything that iMessaging does. The big difference is that all of those existing solutions are not tied to iOS or OSX. Thus they are cross-platform (no lock-in) but that also means that you have to add this software to your devices. It's very nice for users to not have to worry about installing Dropbox, Evernote, or eBuddy. But the obvious win for Apple is here is the lock-in. If you start relying on Pages for writing docs and sync'ing them across devices, you are going to be very reluctant to buy anything other than an iPhone (and a Mac for that matter.) If you get used to using iMessaging to chat with your other iPhone toting friends, same thing.

Apple is keeping the cost of using all of their new offerings very low. It's a classic loss leader strategy. It's ok if iCloud and iMessaging both lose a lot of money for Apple. If they can just lock-in existing iPhone users, they can continue to make huge profits. In that scenario, it's ok for Google/Android to have N times the number of users as Apple. The Apple users won't be going anywhere, and they spend a lot of money. Seems like a smart strategy by Apple. It should work out much better than it did for the Republican party in 2008.

WWDC Wish List

Tomorrow is WWDC. Much like how I had an Android wish list for Google I/O (and I got my top two wishes!) a few weeks ago, I have one for the iPhone and WWDC. Given that OS 4.0 has been in beta for quite awhile, there is a little less suspense. So my wish list is a little more product based instead of development based.

1.) iPhone for Verizon. AT&T has nixed the generous data plans for the iPad (as well as for the iPhone,) so really why is there any reason for Apple to stay exclusive with them? In fact one could imagine that AT&T busted out the new pricing last week because they knew their exclusivity was coming to an end. I certainly hope this is the case. Personally I would not switch to Verizon, but I hope that many folks do. Plus I think that if folks had a choice of iPhone on AT&T or iPhone on Verizon, then both companies would compete much harder, improving networks and dropping prices. This is a key but subtle component of the Android strategy that fanboys/apologists often seem to miss.
2.) Non-AppStore apps. No way, right? Don't be so sure. How easy would it be for Apple to give folks a deeply buried user preference for allowing non-AppStore apps on their iPhone? An insignificant number of users would ever enable this "dangerous" option, but it would do so much. From a PR perspective, it would take the heat off Apple. Actually this might not just be PR, it might be legal as well. Want to use Flash to develop for the iPhone? Ok, just distribute it through your own channels to users who want to go outside of the AppStore. Obviously this would really make life easier on developers. The current provisioning process is ridiculous.
3.) Mobile Safari improvements. I expect that we'll hear about how Safari and/or Mobile Safari is fifty-billion percent faster than ... something else. Apple is fond of blowing up micro-benchmarks. I'd like to also see some new features. I'd really like to see Web Workers, especially since Safari already supports them. I'd be thrilled to see the Device API, so that we can get access to the camera (and how about that front-facing camera, too?) and how about access to a user's contacts? It feels like Android'd browser is really pulling ahead of Mobile Safari, so it would be great to see Apple take back their lead.
4.) Real multitasking. I'm probably going to hurl tomorrow when I have to hear Steve Jobs brag about multitasking in iPhone OS 4.0. It's bullshit. As I've said before, OS 4.0 does not implement multitasking, it implements a handful of multitasking use cases. There is a big difference. Of course there is no chance of this. The multitasking in OS 4.0 is obviously technology designed by marketing and business people, not by engineers. They want to put an end to those obnoxious Motorola Droid commercials that make fun of a "a phone that can't walk and chew gum at the same time." So instead of figuring out how to do multitasking right, so that it enables developers without sacrificing performance, we get a useless feature (unless you happen to be one of the three use cases) that will be hailed as revolutionary.

Let Them Eat Safari

I can't complain about Apple's WWDC being too disappointing, not with it coming fresh on the heels of true disappointment the night before. Still, there wasn't much there. In fact there was only thing of note:

Apple doesn't want to open the iPhone up as an application development platform. Instead they want everyone to build AJAXed web apps (oh by they way, screw Flash, Silverlight, and JavaFX.) To help developers with this, they are pushing out Safari for Windows, so you can easily test your web app against the "same" rendering engine that will be used on the iPhone. In essence, they are trying to push Safari as the standard for HTML/CSS/JavaScript rendering ... Which isn't so bad, since Safari passes the Acid2 test, but I digress.

I know we all keep hearing about how Apple doesn't third party apps causing the iPhone to crash or whatever, but that is just lame and obviously far from honest. I think it is more likely that they have some technical limitations that are preventing them from supporting JavaME or some other standardized runtime, and they are not ready to roll out their own.

So I guess if I want to do map search on the iPhone, I better like using Google Maps. If I want push email to it, I better be using Yahoo Mail. I don't guess I'll be pulling down videos from YouTube or ESPN to watch on the phone.

Of course having a "full" browser on the phone is huge. Apple has to be totally committed to this at this point. Theoretically I can go to GMail directly on the iPhone and get the full AJAX interface we all know and love. Maybe there is some way to have it run in the background so I can get the email pushed to me. Of course I still can't go to Yahoo Maps, since it uses Flash ... Ditto with YouTube... Also, Outlook Web Access works ok on Safari, though it's not going to provide push email like the IE version would (or like you would get with a Blackberry.)

So does any of this matter? The most significant thing is that one can expect that support for Safari just became more important web developers everywhere. Not a lot more important, but at least a little. I don't think Microsoft or Mozilla have to worry too much about IE/Firefox users switching to Safari. It's big draw is speed, and Opera was already way faster than IE or Firefox. Plus it's got a lot of issues...