Oliver Steele

One — but only one — reason for Apple’s appeal is that Apple products are luxury goods. (I’ll get to the second reason in a moment.) Apple products compete on design, not price. The Apple stores, with their hardwood floors and wide open spaces, are modeled after a luxury car showroom, and don’t share the convenience store layout and shelving of other computer stores.

Focusing on the high end of the market is a reasonable strategy¹. (Sony is trying it with the VAIO.) In an area that depends on third parties to create programs and peripherals, this strategy has a benefit beyond high profit margins. Hardware and software makers are disproportionately interested in Apple’s customers, because these customers have shown themselves to be disproportionately willing to spend money on computer products. This is why Apple can have 1% of the desktop market but — unlike Linux in 2004 — command compatability from web sites and large software vendors. Selling to Apple customers is like opening a store in Beverly Hills; if the products are good enough to sell there, it’s worth the real estate cost.

If everyone in America makes an extra-large Thanksgiving dinner so that they can feed guests the next day, isn’t this a pyramid scheme?

The developer world is divided into two camps. Language mavens wax rhapsodic about the power of higher-level programming — first-class functions, staged programming, AOP, MOPs, and reflection. Tool mavens are skilled at the use of integrated build and debug tools, integrated documentation, code completion, refactoring, and code comprehension. Language mavens tend to use a text editor such as emacs or vim — these editors are more likely to work for new languages. Tool mavens tend to use IDEs such as Visual Studio, Eclipse, or IntelliJ, that integrate a variety of development tools¹.

Last month, Laszlo Systems released the Laszlo platform as Open Source. The intent was to to remove the bottleneck in the virtuous cycle of software development.

Today IBM alphaWorks released IDE for Laszlo. This is an Eclipse-based IDE for creating, editing, debugging, and testing applications written in Laszlo.