Apple has long time since understood the power of enabling. They enabled designers some 20 years ago with the realease of the Macintosh, the GUI and together with Adobe, made the Postscript language usable.
In more recent times, Apple started listing 3rd party apps, sorted in categories and nicely presented, thus making it really easy to find software you needed. A really simple thing, really. It was easy to add the software (for developers) and it was easy to get it (for users). Later, Apple did the same thing with widgets for Dashboard. Top 50 list, featured app, etc. Really easy to find and install what you needed. When you downloaded a widget, you were automatically asked if you wanted to install it (or update, in case you already had a previous version), and then if you wanted to keep it.
This is crowdsourcing at its best. Apple only needs to provide the framework. 3rd party developers did most of the work writing the apps and supporting them.
When Wordpress, the most popular self-hosted blogging platform in the world – also driving this very blog, did the same for their plugins some time in 2006, they saw dowloads increase 15-fold. All they needed to do was make it easy for developers to list and present their plugins and presto, users started finding them and using them, which led to more plugins being developed, and contributed to the massive growth Wordpress has seen since version 1.5.
Both Apple and Wordpress have also added ratings to allow users to promote stuff they like. They both make top lists available so casual users don’t have such a hard time finding the most popular items. That’s what you have to do if you want to go mainstream.
And now, Apple does it again with the App store for iPhone. And they take it even further. They combine it with iTunes, another great tool they’ve developed in recent years, and one that will probably see some interesting change in the years to come. If for no other reason, because it’s odd to have apps, videos and syncing services for contacts in a product that’s called “tunes”, and Apple likes to keep things tidy.
Nokia, Sony, Microsoft, Blackberry, Samsung et al never understood this, it seams. They are all about engineering. Sure, you could download apps for your Symbian phone, somewhere, but it was clunky, no “sex appeal”, and there was no syncing (it’s very useful to have a connection to the desktop/laptop world). While the other manufacturers were busy with who knows what for years, Apple built so many trojan horses into their businesses that the others now look like clowns falling over each other while trying to recover from the nightmare they’ve awoken to.
And it is not like you couldn’t do similar things on other platforms. To enable is to do more than just make it possible.
Check out some interesting articles about the App store:
I can only marvel at how good execution is at Apple nowadays. They understand how people work, they get the economics, they plan ahead and they execute patiently. It’s beautiful to watch.
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