This is part four in a five part series. Click here for part one. Click here for part two. Click here for part three.
The BlackBerry by Research In Motion (RIM) was unique in that it attempted to court enterprise customers primarily. While it has slowly moved into the consumer market buoyed by its success in industry, its desire to be the go-to product for business users only differentiated it from Palm, who focused on consumers, and Microsoft, who focused on all users through multiple OSes. When Apple introduced the iPhone (and its non phone-equivalent, the iPod Touch), with one OS (the iPhone OS) for both enterprise and consumer markets, many analysts betted against its success in the corporate world.
Part IV: Apple iPhone
Apple's iPod success and recent market share increase due to its MacOS X operating system led to predictions of an iPhone way before its debut in Summer 2007. At the time of its arrival, it lacked a fundamental component from a developer's standpoint: a SDK. Instead, they suggested using web application development as a way to develop for the iPhone. The only reason why this wasn't completely laughed out of the the WWDC conference in 2007 was that their mobile version of Safari blew every other mobile browser out of the park, with support for CSS, JavaScript, and other Web 2.0 technologies on par with traditional browsers.
Nevertheless, an SDK was eventually released the following year, which allowed for developers to use Objective-C for development. Mac development in general is done on a Mac, and is essentially the C language with message passing (a la Smalltalk) thrown in. While the language is relatively open and limited libraries exist for socket communication, cryptography, and general utility functions, Objective-C is still a lower-level language than C# or Java. Apple provides an IDE to assist in the creation of applications.
Like Java, Objective-C code also requires code signing in order to run, which presents barrier to entry for learners and hobbyists, though simulators help overcome that obstacle. In addition, Apple has as part of its licensing agreement certain restrictions on what can be developed for the iPhone, which makes it less open from a legal standpoint than a technological one.
Despite these large restrictions, Apple has had great success in bringing developers over to the iPhone, in large part because of their brand name recognition, but largely due to their App Store. By providing a central repository for "Apple approved" applications, Apple makes it easy for users to find and download cost-to-use or free (free as in beer, anyway) applications for a percentage of the price.
So one OS can be used successfully in the enterprise and consumer handheld markets, contrary to the then-prevailing belief. Moreover, developers can flock to develop for a company even with seemingly ludicrous restrictions and hurdles (lack of an SDK, openness, code-signing, restrictions on what you may develop) if others ("How can I get people to buy or even use my application?") are lifted.
For the last four days, we have focused on true handheld computers from Palm, Microsoft, RIM, and Apple. Over time, each of them have converged with cell phones, and these smartphones are used throughout the enterprise and consumer sector. Tomorrow we will discuss the largest cell phone manufacturer in the world, with roughly forty percent of the world's cell phone market, making it the de facto leader in handheld device production.
Erhan J. Kartaltepe,
erhan.kartaltepe-at-utsa.edu
