"Developers, developers, developers, developers." Steve Ballmer dancing around a stage remains the most arresting image from his decade-long tenure as CEO of Microsoft (MSFT).
But he was right. The ability of developers of all kinds to profit from a corporate ecosystem is at the heart of all the summer developer conferences, from Microsoft, Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and especially Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), which opened its developer conference Monday.
While Google focuses in on what you can do a few years from now, and Microsoft focuses on sophisticated business tools, Apple focuses on tools you can use to make money from consumers now. Shorten the time to think about it, shorten the development time, shorten the time to market and profit - that's a big difference between Tim Cook's Apple and that of Steve Jobs.
You can make money with Proactive Assistant, where you couldn't really make much with Siri. Making security a feature reduces developer cost and risk. An API for search may sound like you're locking people in to stores and places, but let developers do the locking-in and they're ecstatic. The Proactive Assistant is designed to be built upon, not as a standalone product. The same is true for Apple Maps.
Apple Pay has morphed into something more user-centric, a Wallet. It's aimed at financial transaction processors like Square, who want to reduce their development costs and create more transactions along the way. You may wonder who the opponent here is - it's the cost of upgrading to EMV, also known as chip-and-pin technology. The Wallet encrypts transactions as they're made, which saves stores money, and delivers data the EMV cards don't, which encourages the technology's use. It also makes integration with loyalty programs easy.
In an age when everything is software, everyone is a developer. Songwriters are developers, which is what all the rhetoric about Apple opposing "music theft" is all about with its new music service. Journalists are developers, which is why we now have Apple News.
Developers are also essential to re-booting the iPad, which starting today is now being positioned as a full PC replacement, with trackpad as well as keyboarding capability. The new iOS 9 is designed around the larger screen, with PC functionality like split-view multitasking designed to pull the Windows ecosystem into Apple's orbit.
Finally, there is the Apple Watch, pushed to the end because Apple wanted to have developers salivating before it brought on the hard sell. To succeed, the Watch will need native apps, and that's what Apple wants developers to create for it. By giving them other things to do as the Watch builds its user base, you make the move to the Watch that much easier.
It reminds me very much of what smart chip companies did a decade ago for Taiwanese OEMs. Rather than offering an "ecosystem" of software, they offered specific designs that could be cut to fit, and make money right away. Reducing the need for developers to think, to develop, and to reach the market is the heart of getting their loyalty. Under Tim Cook, Apple has been turning that into a science.
All without anyone having to jump up and down around a stage.
