Stephen O’Grady:

Remember that, at its core, the iPhone offers not a whole lot more than a phone, browser, camera, iPod and GPS. Which, ok, is kind of impressive. But not truly differentiating, Apple’s acknowledged strength in user experiences aside. As good and smart as Apple is at design – and they are very, very good – they’re never going to be as good and smart as everyone else. We see this in the enterprise world frequently, where vendors that foster an ecosystem succeed and those that don’t, well, don’t. But we haven’t seen too many examples of this play out in the consumer world yet, which is one of the reasons the iPhone is such an interesting platform. With the App Store, Apple’s attempting to cement its role with a community play.

I find it interesting that everyone holds up the App Store as the key reason for the iPhone being successful – the key differentiating factor. Has everyone forgotten that the iPhone originally launched with no developer SDK at all and how well did that go? That’s right, it was a massive success.

The iPhone is not succeeding purely because of the App Store, in fact it could just as easily be the opposite – the App Store is succeeding because the iPhone is so popular. There’s nothing simple about developing for the iPhone – you have to learn Objective-C and Cocoa Touch, you have to pay to get involved at all and you don’t know if you’ll be allowed to ship your app until after you finish it and submit it to Apple. So why do people do it? Because there are a huge number of iPhone users out there.

In the short time the iPhone has been out, people have simply forgotten how revolutionary the phone and Apple software that comes with it actually is. The third party apps are just very tasty icing on top.

Antonio Cangiano:

In theory I could have been disappointed. After all, my visit didn’t fix the problem at hand, my expensive laptop seemed to be good as a door stopper, and repairing this thing could potentially be less advantageous than just buying a newer unit. Yet, as I arrived home, I told my wife that my next laptop would definitely be an Apple.

The reason for this is that I saw a genuine effort to help me out, an unheard level of care for the customer and an willingness to do what’s right, even if it costs the company some money. The whole experience was very positive and I felt that the premium cost of Apple’s products is easily justified by this kind of support.

The way you support your clients is a key part of any products and services your company provides. No matter how much you focus on quality, things will go wrong sometimes and your clients will have problems. Ironically, that’s your biggest chance to make them a fan for live because while people expect products to work all the time, they don’t expect support experiences to be much good. If you provide a great support experience, it surprises them and makes them notice.

Two examples I’ve had recently really confirm that.  The first was with one of Ephox’s clients who were experiencing a lot of crashes. It had reached the point where the authors were unable to do any work and the content migration had pretty much completely stopped – their project timeline was dead in the water. Thankfully, they were extremely patient and friendly people so even in such a stressful time were really good to work with and I made sure I dropped everything and worked whatever hours were required to solve their problems. Most importantly though, I gave them copious status updates to make sure they knew exactly what was going on and give them the information that their bosses were going to ask for. We’ve solved the major issues and are still working to clean up some more minor issues, but they’ve already offered to give us a reference.

The second case was with a Freecom Tough Drive I bought. It’s meant to be powered off the USB bus, but PowerBook G4s don’t supply enough power that way so the one I bought for my wife has sat in the drawer for quite a while. Recently though our regular backup drive failed so I really needed to get it working. Turns out they’ll ship you a free power adapter if you need it, you just have to email them. I did, and got a response within about 30 minutes to say the adapter would be in the mail asap. Needless to say, I’m seriously impressed and will be sticking with Freecom for any portable hard drives I need in the future.

It’s easy to think of support as a cost centre for your business and something that should be outsourced, but the reality is that it’s one of the best opportunities for impressing your clients, building great word of mouth and perhaps most importantly, getting real world feedback on your products so you can make them better in the future.

Since the search function for Apple’s mailing lists is pretty much useless, I’m making a note of the Reading PICT Images thread which contains numerous options for rendering PICT images in Java on OS X.

iUI looks like a promising library for making the development of iPhone webapps much simpler.  Worth keeping an eye on since there’s no barrier to entry for iPhone webapps unlike with native iPhone apps.

Brent has an excellent post up about his experience developing NetNewsWire for the iPhone and he manages to say what I tried to yesterday before I got caught up listing my frustrations with Mobile NetNewsWire:

I’ve always worked in public or semi-public: release, listen to feedback, release, listen, repeat forever. I worked this way for years UserLand. All of NetNewsWire was developed this way, beginning with the very earliest betas of NetNewsWire Lite back in 2002.

…

Which is why I’m more than a little bit at sea with the iPhone development experience. Getting beta testers is a technical and legal challenge. And I’m used to having hundreds, not just a few. Discussing development and design issues with other developers is usually a valuable thing, but there’s an NDA in the way.

That’s basically what I meant to say. The iPhone development model, the secrecy and the timelines imposed by Apple have effectively prevented any of the developers from creating a truly great iPhone app. To create truly great apps you need user feedback. Apple itself has enough people internally that can try the iPhone and give that feedback, but the smaller developers can’t get that feedback without releasing publically.

Sadly, in my last post I only managed to get one sentence that actually reflected this, despite the fact that it was intended to be my main message:

Sadly, the launch of the app store for me demonstrated just how much effort Apple put in to polishing their applications and getting them right and just how important it is to get real user feedback during development.