Errata

Remember ChromeOS? Google’s once highly-touted browser-as-operating-system was going to be a Really Big Thing in the netbook space. But as a friend pointed out to me today, we haven’t heard bupkis about it in a while now.

There are two extremes in product development: the Apple Way, where you say nothing about what you’re working on, torture and kill anyone who spills the beans, slave away in utter secrecy, finally springing your product fully-formed upon the waiting market like Athena from the forehead of Zeus.

Then there’s the Microsoft Way: start pimping your product while it’s nothing but bullet points on a PowerPoint slide, talk endlessly about your “roadmap”, continuously solicit “buy-in” from a multitude of partners, catch flak in the trade press every time you rethink your strategy or tweak your feature set, and ultimately deliver your product behind schedule, over budget, missing major promised features, leaving the market saying “Is that all?”

Google has stayed mostly between the two extremes, tending toward the big-mouthed Microsoft Way. But with Apple dead-set on cutting their legs out from under ‘em in the mobile space, perhaps they’ve realized the wisdom of keeping their mouths shut. 

Some folks still don’t get it. First, Cory Doctorow ranted about how the iPad is evil because it’s not all Open Sores or something. Then there’s that notoriously cranky curmudgeon Dave Winer:

And pragmatically, experience has shown that the winning computer platforms are the ones you can develop for on the computer itself, and the ones that require other, more expensive hardware and software, don’t become platforms. There are exceptions but it’s remarkable how often it works this way.

So, the fact that you can’t program for the iPhone has really killed the iPhone. Um… except it hasn’t. And I don’t think any Wii apps were programmed on the Wii. Ditto the Nintendo DS. Or the PS/PS2/PS3/XBOXen, TiVo, PalmPilot, Treo, Garmin GPSs… You get the idea. 

Basically, this is just Winer saying, “You kids, with your newfangled mobile devices, get off my lawn!“

What they really don’t get is that developing for the iPhone/iPad is tons easier than developing for Windows, Linux (sorry, Cory) or even Mac OS X. But for the low, low price of just $99 (call now!), anyone with a Mac can program for the iPhone/iPad, too. Or you can do it for free, with nothing but HTML5/CSS/JavaScript. In fact, it just may be the most accessible platform for creative coding since the Apple ][ — a fact that seems go completely over their pointy heads.

In the Good Old Days of Geekdom, the bare-metal hardware was the platform where you learned and developed. Now it’s the hardware/OS platform. The opportunity is still there, the platform has just evolved. But not all of the geeks out there have.