The China Vortex

I am a fan of Apple’s products. I believe that the hardware is well-designed, and so is the software. In particular, I believe that the design philosophy behind Objective-C and Cocoa frameworks are the best thought-out and implemented tools for any developer looking for a strong and robust environment for object-oriented programming.

Like other Apple fans, I get excited at the new hardware the company puts out on a regular basis. I have reconciled myself to the fact that the top-of-the-line Macbook Pro I now use will shortly be replaced by a newly refreshed iteration of this line, and I will soon torment myself when I see others with their newer computers. The sames goes for my iPod touch.

I am also a fan of Steve Jobs; he shows what can be done by a very smart guy who has fallen down a few times in life who now has a good plan, and who just focuses on implementing his plan. The guy knows exactly what he wants, and doesn’t let anyone or anything get in the way of his plans. He is the poster boy for a smart authoritarian and autocratic management in an organization. I’m convinced that without a firm grasp of the challenges the company faced in 1997, Apple would have quickly gone into bankruptcy.

Steve Jobs saved Apple.

This is why I get upset with the company’s policies towards China. I mean, for Apple to criticize the Chinese government for not being open and nice to minorities is just completely wide of the mark.

With this in mind, let me show you how the Chinese government, in comparison to Apple’s management, is in fact much more open and democratic:

• China now has a group leadership on the national level. Who is in the group leadership at Apple? And how much do you see others besides Steve Jobs talking about “different directions” at Apple?
• Who is going to be the successor to President Hu Jintao. I can name several candidates including Xi Jinping, Bo Xilai, Zhou Yongkang, just to name a few. Who is going to succeed Steve Jobs? I can’t name any.
• Leaking any information about any new products which have not yet been announced at Apple are grounds for immediate dismissal. Same goes for China.
• Apple employees are not allowed to publish unofficial blogs without company permission. Doing so may be grounds for dismissal. China has 100 million blogs; all of them are unofficial.
• In private meetings with Steve Jobs and Apple senior and executive management, the senior and executive management turn and look to Steve Jobs for permission to speak before speaking, even when they are addressed directly. The Chinese national government leadership is more relaxed than Steve about other senior officials speaking about national affairs.
• For many Apple employees, the most dreaded moment is sharing the same elevator ride with Steve. If he talks to them and he asks what they do, and they go not give a good response, he just might terminate them.

Basically, Apple (the company) is an extension and implementation of one man’s (Steve Jobs) vision of what the consumer electronics and computing industry should look like. And ironically, laws in the US permit Steve Jobs to run his company in a very autocratic fashion. I have not yet heard of people being “dismissed” from China because they were not productive according to one ruler’s definition. On the contrary, the Chinese government goes out of its way to keep the Chinese economy on a growth track, creating more jobs. (I must admit that I think many of these jobs are of questionable value, but that’s another discussion.)

And yet, Apple doesn’t like things the Chinese government does because they are less than democratic and are autocratic? How many current Apple employees do you see protesting at the way the company is run? I’ll tell you how many there are.

Zero, nada, zilch.

Sure, Steve Jobs is running a company and the Chinese government is running a country, but is there anything to suggest that Steve would act any differently and suddenly become open and democratic if he were running a country?

Come on Steve, look in the mirror. When it comes to autocracy, the Chinese government can’t hold a candle to you.

I’m really trying to wrap my mind around this and am trying very very hard to understand Apple’s criticisms of China. If anyone can explain this to me, I’m all ears.

Technorati Tags: Apple, authoritarian, blogging, blogs, China, Chinese, cocoa, developers, framework, hujintao, iPod, ipodtouch, macbook, Macintosh, objective_c, Tibet

Several months ago I wrote about how Apple’s opening of the iPhone SDK and its App Store would create a whole new business ecosystem for application developers for that platform. Apple offers globally accessible hosting and payment clearance in return for a 30% cut of the app’s sales price.

Now, there are early signs that the strategy is paying off for some early application developers who have developed popular apps for the iPhone and iPod touch (which uses the same SDK as the iPhone) users. Eliza Block, who developed 2 Across, a word game for the iPhone platform, has reportedly cleared in the area of $2,000 a day according to this article.

The App Store is a new updated version of the shareware movement which took hold in the early 80s with the launch of the Apple Macintosh 128K. In those days, homebrew developers would develop games, apps and productivity tools which were distributed on floppy disks. (Remember those? If you do, you’re showing your age.) More often than not, these came with a message which went something like “If you liked this app, please show your appreciation by sending a contribution to this address.” More often than not, people just used the apps without sending money, although there were a few kind and generous souls who did.

Now, Apple has become the doorkeeper for these independent developers. There is no more reliance on the kindness of strangers; Apple takes care of global distribution and payment for new apps in return for 30% of the app’s sales price. For devs, the App Store is the perfect barometer for what’s hot and what’s not.

In contrast, Facebook and others have not been able to find the magic balance point between independent developers and their own corporate needs for revenue. When Facebook opened its platform to developers, it ended up enabling app developers to spam the FB audience, driving many away from Facebook. Now, with Facebook Connect, FB is trying to find that balance point.

Chinese social media companies are no better at finding the right balance between independent devs and their own need for revenue. While there has been talk about open systems in China, all of the competing business models in fact, are not open. Apple’s system is certainly not open. it’s just that Apple is willing to share in order to grow the pie.

Apple and Steve Jobs have successfully put themselves at the juncture of technology, business and hardware, and are willing to share a larger cut in order to drive up sales of a very attractive new hardware platform. With growing earnings from hardware sales, Apple can afford to be generous with devs, and is effectively subsidizing a new business ecosystem. By making some independent developers financially successful with App Store and getting that word out, they do something none of their competition have been able to do yet.

The question for Chinese companies such as Tencent is whether they are willing to use their high corporate earnings to subsidize their own independent developers’ business ecosystem as Apple has, and share some of the revenue in order to grow the pie for everyone? Or do they still think that they can own the whole pie? Tangos Chan says that they still believe that they can own the whole pie.

But Tangos believes that this will change in the future. In the meantime, more independent devs will gravitate to developing for the iPhone platform. It’s better to open up sooner while there is still interest in their platform because opening up later means that they will have to be that much more generous in order to attract developers away from Apple’s platform.

After all, that’s where the money is. And I’m sure that Steve loves how his competitors’ moves help his platform.

What more could he ask for?

Technorati Tags: Apple, applications, apps, appstore, business, corporations, developers, distribution, ecosystem, facebook, gaming, iPhone, iPod, Macintosh, productivity, sdk, stevejobs, tencent, tools

If you are interested in the kinds of social networking applications Chinese are now using today, David Feng offers some ground-level observations in this article. I’m a great fan of first hand research and observations and David offers some excellent observations.

Maybe it’s been a reaction to some of media coverage of everything which has been going on with the coverage of China and Tibet, but I have been diving into technology lately. Specifically, I have been digging deeper into Apple’s frameworks for development on the Macintosh and iPhone platforms.

Here are some of my observations:

– Everything’s an object, and everything’s object-oriented. Think of actors on a stage, and passing data to objects, which act on them. All the time.
– The MVC (model, view, controller) analogy is used throughout, which makes it natural for Macintosh developers to make the leap over to Ruby on Rails development and other non-Ruby frameworks such as Django;
– While Microsoft has worked on developing new languages such as ASP.net and C#, Apple has stuck with one: Objective-C, which has roots in NeXT and OpenStep. (For instance, all classes begin with NS. What does NS stand for? NextStep.)
– Apple’s efforts, in contrast with Microsoft’s, has been on developing frameworks;
– Think of the frameworks as sandboxes which Apple provides for you to play in, which you can gradually grow and develop with, and then later contribute to;
– Cocoa and Cocoa Touch are frameworks of classes, all based on Objective-C. You use these classes to instantiate your objects;
– Instead of thinking about writing code, you spend more time thinking what you want your objects to do, and objects messaging each other;
– Apple provides many sample applications and their code. You learn by making minor changes to the code and seeing what happens;
– There is a small and very dedicated community made of Apple developers. Very smart people.
– The documentation is REALLY good, and includes videos which you can download into iTunes, online documentation, and documentation in Xcode, the development tool. It is clear, sharp, concise and jargon-free.
– Every Macintosh ships with all the development tools you need, including Xcode, Interface Builder and Dashboard so that you can develop native apps or web apps right out of the box.

After some play with it, I’ve come to the conclusion that part of the reason there are relatively few developers working on the Objective-C/Macintosh/iPhone platform is because it completely rejects procedural programming as a development model. In fact, procedural programming would most likely be a handicap in shifting to the Macintosh programming model because it basically requires programmers to relearn a new programming model.

If you embrace object-oriented programming and agile development as a model though, it’s the best.

Technorati Tags: agiledevelopment, Apple, cocoa, cocoatouch, Dashboard, development, Interface Builder, Macintosh, microsoft, next, nextstep, objective_c, openstep, rubyonrails, sns, socialnetworking, software, Xcode