tmsmqwx's Profile

I would venture to say that you are precisely who Chris Seibold was refering to in his article "What Technofiles Don't Get About The iPhone." Here's the money quote: "That is what is so hard for the tech types to understand. Tech types talk to other tech types and they ALL know the iPhone's shortcomings. It is a natural thing to think that the rest of the world is in the same spot. But they aren't. The average person isn't a tech type, they aren't interested in the minutiae of (sic) the spec sheet. They just want something that works with a minimum amount of fuss for maximum (sic) returns." Sound like anyone you know?

Bottom line - Apple is a hardware company. They provide software purely to make their hardware more attractive, and they've stated as much. They've learned to walk a fine line since they screwed this part up in the 80's: you make just enough software to attract the average-to-above-average user to your hardware, but not so much that you scare or piss-off your developers - your platform is dependent upon the viability of that third-party ecosystem. It's the reason they ended up spinning off Appleworks into Claris. Yes, they do produce "value-added" products, and what they can't produce in-house they acquire. But they realize the limits they are working with. Notice how they go out of their way not to market iWork as a full-fledged alternative to MS Office. They also purposely leave holes in their OS and other applications, nitches they hope third-party developers will fill.