Why the iPhone

Let me make it clear up front: I am not one of those rabid Apple Computer or Steve Jobs fans. In fact, if anything, I'm more of a Microsoft apologist. While I was growing up in Alaska, they were the "home team", as it were. I spent my tender years rooting for both Microsoft and (in vain) the Seahawks.

This week is the Apple WorldWide Developer's Conference here in San Francisco and you can't get away from the new iPhone. In true Steve style, the ads are plastered in every BART station to announce the coming of the faster, cheaper version of the device.

Yesterday at the IBF Venture Capital Investing Conference a guy came up to me and asked "what is it with the damned iPhone? I'm investing in companies who have limited resources but need a mobile strategy." I told him to bet on the iPhone and here's why.

At the root are software developers. Not the academic, ivory tower developers like me who learned to code in languages like LISP, Smalltalk and C++. I'm talking about the guys out of the dark corners of the development world; the street fighters, the alley cats. The guys who got a job at an ISP, started writing Perl scripts, then cobbled together some systems with PHP and Python and are now moving on to Ruby on Rails.

The great migration started back in March of 2001 with the release of OS X. At the time many software developers were using Windows machines or dual-boot Mac/Yellow Dog Linux boxes. With the move to OS X and its UNIX kernel Apple slowly started the (now 7 year) process of moving these developers off Windows and Linux and on to the Mac.

It's been partly due to the great tools Apple has bundled with OS X and partly due to the lack of good tools for Windows. It is also due to the fact that the systems being used in the data centers to host those applications are running some form of UNIX. Better to learn to navigate one OS rather then two. At this point, virtually all of the developers I know are now using the Mac as their primary development tool.

Fast-forward to March 2008 and the release of the iPhone SDK. Developers who were already using the Mac environment for development were writing iPhone applications in their spare time. People were able to show me interesting iPhone applications within two weeks of the release of the SDK.

So when people ask me what mobile platform they should be spending their development dollars on. When we're planning a mobile strategy for a software application, it's generally for the iPhone. It should be no surprise. Where the best developers go, the customers follow. Microsoft, of all companies, knows this. And unless Apple makes a big misstep, from what I've seen the developers are on the Mac and iPhone to stay.