Nik Rawlinson
The WWDC sell-out shows Apple is calling the shots in the mobile arena.
If ever proof was needed that the future is mobile, it comes from Apple’s ticketing staff. This year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) has sold out in record time, despite its narrow focus on iPad and iPhone development.
In previous years, the WWDC has been far more skewed to the full-blown Mac OS X, and took a month or so to sell out. This year, it’s iPhone OS all the way, and the tickets – at $1500 (about £1022) apiece – sold out in less than a week. This is doubly good news for Apple, for it points to yet higher revenues.
Should you or I choose to sit down and write an application for the Mac, Apple might never know. We could either sell it online or through third-party stores, and apart from the fact that it may drive sales of further Mac hardware, we needn’t share any of the sales revenue with the Cupertino giant.
Go mobile, however, and it’s a completely different scenario. I won’t go through the economics of selling on the App Store, but it’s a well-known fact that Apple takes a cut of every sale in return for stocking your program and taking care of the payment process. You can see, then, why the company decided to skew this year’s conference towards mobile programming.
More importantly, though, the massive and rapid take-up of places also somewhat vindicates Apple’s position vis-a-vis approval. The whole process has come in for a fair amount of criticism over the past two years, and Apple hasn’t helped the cause by making seemingly illogical and arbitrary decisions from time to time. The fact that so many developers are willing to stump up $1500, with no guarantee of any return simply to attend a conference is therefore very heartening indeed. And even more so when many will justify the expense on the back of promised meetings that could more easily have taken place online.
Apple, then, is enjoying the kind of industry support for its mobile platform it has never experienced for its desktop computers. Even when it does wrong, it does right, and I’d not be surprised if we saw more proposed products going the same way as Microsoft’s dual-screen tablet device – the Courier Project – and quietly shutting down in the face of Apple’s unstoppable rise.
Apple is the new IBM. It’s setting a standard to which all of its rivals must aspire. The fact that an expensive and narrowly focused conference can sell out in such short order is evidence too, that we’ll soon be asking by default whether a product is iPad compatible, just as we asked whether PCs were IBM compatible some 20 years ago.
