Re: Cocoa's Popularity
Re: Cocoa's Popularity
- Subject: Re: Cocoa's Popularity
- From: Jeff LaMarche <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002 22:06:09 -0800
Aw, hell; I thought I was smart enough not to dive into another one of
these heated discussions. Guess not. =)
On Friday, March 22, 2002, at 09:25 PM, Erik M. Buck wrote:
Apple
knows which developers are important for the platform and Cocoa
hobbyists
are not important.
Not entirely true - every program put out by a hobby developer, no
matter how insignificant or crappy is one they can add to the Mac OSX
Applications page on Apple's home page. Apple will never overlook an
opportunity to exploit us when we are a marketing opportunity.
Given Apple's track record and NeXT's track record, what
makes anyone think Cocoa will still be for sale one year from now ?
I didn't buy Cocoa, did you? If so, I think I have a bridge laying
around here somewhere you might want...
It
probably will be, but what incentive does Apple have to continue public
support of Cocoa ?
See comment #1 above. It's also in Apple's best interest to have people
out there using Cocoa to come up with the NBT. Cocoa is a very good
tool for people to develop innovative things and having innovative
things first is in the company's interest.
After all, Cocoa is their "secret" competitive
advantage. Some one or two developer shop might compete iTunes or
iMovie or
iPhoto by using Cocoa.
You'd have to do a hell of a job to compete here. You'd have to do it by
making a significantly better App than iPhoto/iTunes/iMovie since you
can't under-cut what Apple charges, and they have a significant head
start. I don't think many people see iMovie, iTunes, or iPhoto clones as
a huge business opportunity unless they're looking to deliver the
programs to the Wintel world.
Apple can achieve all of their goals by keeping Cocoa
for internal use only. Carbon is now a proven API. Apple may just
give up
supporting multiple APIs and focus on the important one.
It would be relatively dumb to make it for internal use only. It doesn't
cost them much to make it available and they get a lot of information
and feedback about it for free, and they have a pool of people learning
a niche language and tool that would otherwise probably (sadly) die.
Without that, they'd have to train everybody they'd hire because it
would become a proprietary toolset. It would also piss off those
software companies that have made the jump to Cocoa, some of which Apple
can't afford to piss off (Hell, isn't Office X written in Cocoa?).
Additionally, as Microsoft has shown us, a software company with no
competition festers and starts turning out poor-quality crap. Apple
can't afford to be the only software vendor pumping out apps for the
Mac, and if they stopped supporting other APIs and made Cocoa for
internal-use only, that's what they'd be doing.
While I'm not a total Apple sycophant -- I am fully aware of the way
they've treated the developer community -- I do know that programming in
Cocoa is fun. I didn't dive into Cocoa a year ago because I saw it as a
market opportunity or because Apple's such a wonderful citizen of the
world - I did it because the designers of NextStep got more things right
than the designers of any other development environment I've used (and
I've used (and still use) many). The reason I get on my PowerBook at
night after spending (on average) eleven hours writing and debugging
programs on Win32 and various real operating systems and then spending
an hour and a half driving home is because it's fun and intellectually
satisfying to program in Cocoa. Hell, if you're programming in Cocoa and
making enough money to live comfortably, you should count yourself
lucky, because there are most definitely worse headaches out there in
bitland and worse tools to be stuck with day-in and day-out.
Jeff
NBT = Next Big Thing
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