E-Commerce Times has published an interesting interview with Apple VP Ron Okamoto by Robyn Weisman (note that Ms. Weisman also does freelance writing for TMO). Mr. Okamoto is in charge of developer relations at Apple, and the interview focuses on Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC). According to Mr. Okamoto, Apple is seeing more cross-platform developers at its conference. From the interview:
E-Commerce Times: What are some of the more interesting developments you have noticed at the WWDC since Mac OS X was released?
Okamoto: The most interesting thing we have seen over the last several years has been the number of different developers coming to the platform under OS X. [On] the enterprise IT side of the equation, there has been a heck of a lot more attention than in the past.
But that’s not the only area where folks have started to take a look at [OS X] as a platform on which to build apps. The open-source community more and more is seeing open-source projects being built on OS X. We are also seeing activity from Java developers who have been coming to the platform.
Year after year, we see more developers with cross-platform experience. Whereas before it was Windows and Mac, today it is very rich and very diverse. It’s some open source, some Java, some Unix, some Windows and some Mac, and that’s a really great thing for us, because we are drawing a bunch of different types of developers from different communities all to develop under the Mac platform.
Mr. Okamoto also says that there has been more interest from IT-oriented developers, as well as life sciences in the last couple of years. There’s more in the full interview, which we recommend as an interesting read.
You can find more information on the WWDC itself at Apple’s Web site.
The Mac Observer Spin:
There are two main components to any computer platform, users and developers. Without users, the developers have no one to sell to, and without developers, the users have nothing to do on their computers.
During Apple’s darkest days in the late 1990s, developers fled the Mac platform in droves, even as users did the same, so the quest to rebuild the Mac’s developer base has been of enormous import to the long term health of the Mac platform. While we already knew that the last several WWDC events have been increasingly successful, the news that some of that success has included more cross-platform developers is particularly interesting.