scoble’s right about microsoft and apple
July 10, 2007 – 1:03 pmScoble’s right in his feedback about the recent adhoc iPhoneDevCamp recently down in the bay area and the lack of support from Apple. Despite everything we’ve all grown to love to hate about Microsoft, if there is one it does right - it knows how to support independent developers. They always have going back to the earliest days of the companies history. They have often done a great job participating in dev communities, recruiting dev’s and evangelists and providing everything they can in terms of support. Even in the earliest days of the company, if they knew you were an active user group member then you would be get starred for special customer support treatment. To Scoble’s point it is absolutely one of the key reasons why Microsoft has been successful.
Living in Seattle and having worked at startups that have gotten the partner and ISV treatment and I can tell you first hand that Microsoft is very generous with its support. And in this day and age where anyone can be a loud and influential evangelist its amazing to see companies like Apple get away with not overtly engaging their key influencers and developers in every possible way. Maybe this will change, but Apple’s arrogance cost them the desktop war, hopefully they will see the errors of their way and not fail again. I would hate to see Steve “Jesus” Jobs fail twice with the same company.
5 Responses to “scoble’s right about microsoft and apple”
I think how transparent a company is willing to be with its information on projects in the pipeline can be correlated to their partner eco-system.
If a company has strong partner relationships, such as Microsoft and Adobe, they tend to be more open with information to ensure their partners have the information they need.
A company less worried about partners such as Apple can be more secretive. This does lead to an exciting holiday type atmosphere when the ’secret’ projects are finally released, but how do partners really fit into this model?
By Thomas on Jul 10, 2007
Spot on. It is one of Microsoft’s key strengths.
Another point for you, Visual Studio is the best IDE on the market and has been for a decade. Think about that.
By Greg O'Byrne on Jul 19, 2007