Ah happy days... my life in the mobile biz:
Apple? Oh the irony: while working for EA Mobile back in 2007, we were working on game-ports to Nokia mobile, being subsidised by Nokia, millions of dollars into EA.
Now RIM and Blackberry were kicking butt throughout the noughties. But in 2007, several interesting things happened: Apple, extending its iTunes music distribution platform, decided to get themselves into the App Market business. Same year, Android did this too - but they were a fresh-faced OS and Google had not established its to-market model as Apple iTunes had done.
Now Blackberry, they were all 'enterprise' - selling lock-in contracts to companies, all businesses owned them: so their to-market app business was secondary. They had devices setup perfectly for business, but were a nightmare to get games onto.
So lets step back a bit further: before Apple got into the iTunes distribution, and the whole 'there's an app for it' started - do you remember how people with phones got their apps? We advertised SMS codes in the back of magazines! That was the to-market model! Apple's distribution method absolutely stormed it.
So, back to me, and in 2007, Nokia also relaunched N-Gage and the Symbian store was also launched. Symbian was a truly great idea, a cross-platform OS that had a chance. But Apple had already taken the limelight... and only companies the size of Google and Microsoft had the funds to keep on fighting. Nokia and Blackberry bled to death over the next few years.
Few years on, Apple and Android continue to flourish, thanks to distribution. Blackberry really messed it up: market-leaders who let things get too old too fast, they failed to properly invest in a decent distribution model, and their OS was just not as well maintained. Nokia were market-leaders in feature-phones but royally messed-up the leap into smartphones, instead having to throw in the towel and try and bail out Windows a few years later...
Apple are not evil: they had a mature distribution model and a charismatic CEO to drive the way forward.
RIM was far too cocky fro far too long: having worked with their UK team in 2012, those guys seemed exasperated by then (before all being fired)- despite them all carrying their Playbooks proudly. BB OS 10? Flop. By then, Apple did not even worry about them.
Now, if you were to highlight the working conditions of those guys making Apple phones, or how boring their latest releases have got - then maybe I'll bite,
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Meanwhile, EA was a truly soul-less experience in the four years I was with them: full of egos and dead-end projects - right up to the day they just laid us all off. Sadly, it's a trend that other companies are adopting in such an industry.
It'll all end us as Time-Warner-Disney anyway,
to help finance the hosting costs of this forum.
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