From One Steve to Another: It’s About the Developers

I got to watch Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, being interviewed at the 2010 Gartner Symposium in Orlando this past week. Though Forbes lists him as the 33rd richest person in the world, he strikes me as the kind of rube who snaps towels at bare geriatric behinds in the country club locker room and passes gas while guffawing at black tie affairs. He’s raucous, loud, uncouth, and passionate about technology and about Microsoft. In one of his more famous moments, he showed that passion by slopping and dripping across a stage while chanting “Developers! Developers! Developers!”

Contrast this with that other Steve: Jobs. He’s refined where Ballmer is outlandish, starched where Ballmer is wrinkled, and precise where Ballmer is coarse. He, too, carries insane passion for technology, though in this case for Apple. You’ll never see Job chanting “Developers!” however, nor even hear him whisper it. Jobs is like the kindergartner who’s decided exactly how all towers should be built, and rushes around snatching wooden blocks from all the other children while hissing that “they’re doing it wrong!” Not content to provide tools and then sit back to see what bright minds do with them, Jobs authors the complete vision and brooks no editing. He’s worked out the big picture, the minutiae, and everything in between, and demands that people come to him.

Go to just about any non-Microsoft conference these days, and you’ll see the hordes of developers that are coming to Jobs. Developers are moving to Macs in startling numbers, and where developers go, consumers generally follow to get the cool software that developers build. True, this means that consumers are largely following developers to the Web, but they’re also following developers to iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Developers play vanguard in the search for better technology, and so comprise a group worth wooing, as Ballmer knows and Jobs denies.

At one time, Java claimed a part of the Jobs vision, and Mac OS X offered a Cocoa-Java bridge so that developers could write Cocoa applications in Java. Jobs got jaded with Java, however, and junked that bridge. Ruby, in the form of RubyCocoa, made a brief appearance in default installations of Xcode, but then got expelled in in Xcode 3.2. You can still install RubyCocoa, and MacRuby continues the charge to allow development of Cocoa apps in Ruby, but I’d be nervous to base a business around building Cocoa apps in Ruby, for fear that Jobs will cool toward Ruby and figure out some way to block Ruby from Cocoa.

Last spring, Apple creating a furor by blocking Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone compiler and other non-approved languages from iPhones. Although Apple finally backed down from the infamous section 3.3.1 that banned languages outside the Jobs vision, the policy reminded developers that Jobs owns the building blocks and isn’t afraid to snatch them back.

In this week’s Back to the Mac event, Jobs announced the next version of Mac OS X, Lion, that includes a few new technologies:

• The Mac App Store
• Launchpad
• Full-screen Apps
• Mission Control

Launchpad faces stiff competition from the myriad other Mac launchers out there (just google “mac launcher” for a taste of what’s available), and anyway Apple’s Dock proves that Apple doesn’t know launchers. Full-screen apps can’t possibly excite anyone; I’ve already braced myself for the mocking from my Windows-loving nephew reminding me that all GUIs have had full screen apps for, like, forever. Mission Control may be a useful upgrade to Expose and Spaces, depending on its implementation, but is hardly the stuff to base a new operating system release upon.

The attention-grabber in the list, however, is the Mac App Store. Reaction has been mixed — a marketplace might increase exposure for many developers, and offloading the e-commerce bits to Apple is probably worth 30% of the take, but developers fret not just at the list of restrictions, but also at the direction this may be taking third-party applications and being able to install whatever you want on your machine. No one can claim that Jobs is a benevolent dictator anymore, at least not with a straight face.

Apple followed that up with the announcement that they’re deprecating their JVM. The Web’s abuzz with commentary, and many are explaining why this is a good thing: Apple shouldn’t be writing the JVM; Oracle/Sun should. While I agree with that, the announcement should have been that Apple was deprecating their JVM and Oracle has pledged to develop, support, and maintain a JVM for Mac. The second half of the announcement went glaringly missing, and all we know for sure is that the Apple JVM will almost assuredly disappear and the only alternative runs GUIs only in X11.

I work in a Java shop, and have crusaded for Macs for our developers. We have a sprinkling of Macs here, but Infrastructure has reservations about rolling Macs out en masse. I’ve told them over and over that Mac is a superior platform for Java development, but until this gaping hole is closed and someone pledges to support a first-class JVM on Mac, I’m keeping my mouth shut. Can you imagine me limping back to those guys and asking for a Windows 7 VM so I can run Eclipse? I’d rather surreptitiously SSH into a Production server and write code there than admit that.

So, Mr. Jobs: take a cue from Mr. Ballmer and treat us developers better. Act like you care about us. Developing software is our livelihood and our passion, and we’ve moved to Macs because we feel they’re a better development platform. We like that you have vision and passion, and we think that most of your vision is good. We have visions, too, and we want you to stop trying to blind us. We can take care of details, too; don’t make us sweat them out with Ballmer.