[emdowling]

It is important to remember context. At the time, Apple was absolutely not a services company. In fact, their services were terrible (eg: MobileMe).

All of their revenue came from selling devices - the improvements year over year were more significant than they are today. Each year would bring new features that would open up entirely new market opportunities for developers and it was happening at such a pace that even Apple engineers could not keep up. Apple needed developers to sell devices much more than they do today.

Steve's argument that having an intermediary between Apple and developers would delay the implementation of new technologies and capabilities is entirely valid in that context. Of course, the context has now changed - Apple is increasingly a services-oriented company, and that means their objectives are to both sell more devices AND sell more services, which puts them at odds with developers who were typically responsible for providing the actual services that ran on top of the platform.

The 2010's was perhaps the single most transformational decade in technology, and while the shift from devices to services may be obvious now, it was far from obvious back then. Steve's clarity is even more impressive when you consider the era in which it was written.

[ksec]

And to add more context, those words were written when iPhone sold only ~10M per year. Now iPhone sell that many in a single weekend only bottlenecked by production and delivery.

Not to mentioned Steve was baffled by the App Economy. Unfortunately it didn't live long enough to see all the beauty and Chaos it brings.