I'm sure that they'd always planned for Safari to be there (their big selling point was always having a killer Web browser), but I honestly don't think they thought *of* it as a development platform.
From all the ducking and weaving they've done over the past few months (*especially* the near-complete blackout of any information to the development community), I believe that this was supposed to be Steve Jobs' dream closed platform -- all Apple, all the time. He's always been prone to that sort of thinking, and it looks to me that he had decided that cell phones were the place where he could get away with it, creating his object of crystalline beauty that no one else would go fiddle in.
AFAICT, they got seriously set back on their heels by the sheer outrage that came out of the rest of the computer community when they announced that it was going to be a closed box, and the "our platform is the Web" thing was pure reaction. Note the timeline: it took *weeks* after the criticism started before they even made the announcement, and they didn't actually develop anything -- they simply came up with spin on what they had already planned.
So no -- I really don't think this was planned as such, and that's why it was so poorly executed. I think that, once again, they got taken aback at the notion that there was a desire for outside software, and they're still trying to figure out how to deal with that...
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Date: 2007-07-17 12:56 pm (UTC)From all the ducking and weaving they've done over the past few months (*especially* the near-complete blackout of any information to the development community), I believe that this was supposed to be Steve Jobs' dream closed platform -- all Apple, all the time. He's always been prone to that sort of thinking, and it looks to me that he had decided that cell phones were the place where he could get away with it, creating his object of crystalline beauty that no one else would go fiddle in.
AFAICT, they got seriously set back on their heels by the sheer outrage that came out of the rest of the computer community when they announced that it was going to be a closed box, and the "our platform is the Web" thing was pure reaction. Note the timeline: it took *weeks* after the criticism started before they even made the announcement, and they didn't actually develop anything -- they simply came up with spin on what they had already planned.
So no -- I really don't think this was planned as such, and that's why it was so poorly executed. I think that, once again, they got taken aback at the notion that there was a desire for outside software, and they're still trying to figure out how to deal with that...