This reminds me of something I thought about last night while I was preparing lecture slides for an introductory object-oriented programming course for a community college. I was rewatching Steve Jobs’ January 1997 Macworld speech, where he was presenting OpenStep to the audience (this was just a few weeks after the announcement of the merger of Apple and NeXT). OpenStep is the original name of the Cocoa Objective-C API in macOS. When Steve Jobs was talking about the benefits of OpenStep compared to the Macintosh Toolbox and Win32, he said it was much easier to develop apps using OpenStep compared to them. He went on to talk about how many small software companies with small teams will be born from leveraging the OpenStep API and development tools.

While the Mac ecosystem did get the Omni Group and some other companies who leveraged OpenStep/Cocoa to build great software, the Mac ecosystem was (and still is) dominated by major vendors (e.g., Microsoft and Adobe) shipping very large apps (e.g., Office and the Creative Suite) developed by very large teams.

I believe ease of development, whether through new APIs or through generative AI, isn’t enough. Competitors to entrenched software companies need to deal with network effects, proprietary file formats and protocols, and the “long tail” of features in large software packages that deter users from switching to smaller, less feature-rich applications.