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. Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t think I will be buying a Nokia again. Actually, the Nokia phones I’ve had have all worked pretty well. There might be exceptions, but at least all the Nokias I’ve used have been sturdy and even battery life has been ok.
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