Next from Apple

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 »

Nokia bought Symbian the other day in what is clearly a desperate move to catch up with Apple. Let’s see how that plays out. Apple, however, still has the great advantage of also offering desktops and laptops, plus the necessary sync between all devices.

People don’t want to do everything on their tiny smartphone’s screen, some things you want to take care of on your desktop/laptop and then sync over. Nokia has a lot of software to write to make this happen. In addition to the hardware and software lead, Apple leads by leaps on the GUI side. And, they have iTunes with it’s enormous amount of content. Nokia is trying to take on that too, with Ovi, but it won’t be easy.

How come Apple managed to sneak up on Nokia like this?

You might also want to read these commentaries on what’s happening by Mashable and Signal to Noise.