How Steve Ballmer Predicted the Downfall of Mac OS X

Back in the year 2000, Steve Ballmer danced, as they say, like a Monkey Boy, chanting, “Developers! Developers! Developers!” in an infinite loop. Sweating like an offensive tackle in August two-a-days, he hopped and pranced and bellowed his devotion to developers. He may have his struggles running a business, but Ballmer understands how important developers are to a platform, and that devotion, along with the ever-excellent Visual Studio (yes, I said that without sarcasm), keeps the Windows developer stable stocked with thoroughbreds. 

Switch gears. The reasons for Apple’s rebirth are often recounted as:

• Steve Jobs’s genius
• The iPod
• The iPad
• Jony Ive’s brilliant design
• Apple’s insistence on simplicity

These reasons have all played a part, no doubt, in Apple’s ridiculous ascent, but absent from this list are Ruby on Rails and TextMate, which either run best (Ruby on Rails) or only (TextMate) on Mac OS X. Apple owes more to Rails and TextMate than anyone lets on. Why? Back up a few years, to around 2005. Just as enterprise developers everywhere began to tire of XML and WSDLs and EJBs and SOAP incompatibilities and JSP syntax and all the other stuff that Java Enterprise Edition uses to yank data from a database and show it on a web page, Rails poked its head out of 37signals and started a cult. People called it magic and mind-reading and crowed about its convention over configuration. Oh, it was so easy to create web apps with, and then oh, it was so easy to write them in TextMate! This fledging cult pushed its dogma until developers everywhere dumped Windows and Dell and even Linux and started tucking MacBook Pros into their backpacks. Speakers at developer conferences soon delivered their talks to a sea of shining silver rectangles sporting glowing Apple logos. Developers had moved to Mac OS X.

All these Rails developers on MacBook Pros needed tools, and discovered they could build them. Xcode was a download away, and you could write shiny apps, so why not? Then the iPhone came and the iPhone SDK that changed its name to the iOS SDK when it married the iPad, and the Xcode acolytes stuffed the iOS App Store full of apps. Some people prospered, most got by, but consumers bought iPhones and iPads faster than Apple could produce them because they could always find “an app for that.” After all, people don’t run OSes; they run apps, and Apple has a bunch of ’em.

Switch gears again. TUAW reports today that hotkey programs have until month’s end to enter the Mac App Store. After that, it seems that Apple will graciously allow grandfathered apps to have their bugs fixed, but can’t accrete any new features (hotkey-related or otherwise). The reports are a little fuzzy, and may pan out to be inaccurate, but they’re alarming. Why? Because developers love keyboards. They love automation. They drift to the mouse as little as they can get away with, express undying love for their keyboards, and never perform manual tasks that they can write a script for. And Apple is telling them they care more about protecting people that don’t know how to protect themselves from random downloads and phishing scams and trojan links. And someday soon they may rip Alfred from us and make us gesture our way to Launchpad and click on apps to launch them and then we’ll really have some gestures for Apple.

Note to Apple: don’t do this. Where developers go, consumers eventually follow. Right now you have the developers. Don’t push us away. And don’t think we wouldn’t dream of going elsewhere. As long as we have bash, vim, and a compiler, we’re pretty mobile. And we hate the mouse–and your mice suck anyway.