Consumer Tech
2 articles on consumer tech, written by the team at SiteCraft Innovation.
Consumer technology looked at from the builder's side: what a platform's decisions mean for the people who have to ship software on it.
Mostly Apple, because Apple's constraints are the most consequential for anyone shipping a mobile product, and because its operations story is more instructive than its product story. Start with the Apple ecosystem strategy for builders.
Apple Under Tim Cook: Operations Lessons for Small Teams
Tim Cook came to Apple's top job from operations, and the company's behaviour has reflected that ever since. Several of those habits scale down to a ten-person studio, and several very deliberately do not.
What Apple's Ecosystem Strategy Teaches Product Builders
Lock-in gets argued about as a moral question. For a builder it is a design question: what exactly makes leaving costly, which of those costs were earned, and which will regulators eventually take away from you.