Now that we are just dabbing our toes into 2016, it’s given me some time and cause to look back at the year that was. A lot of things were happening in 2015 but they broadly break down into who was involved: Apple, Google, Microsoft, VC Startups. Today, we start with Apple.
Swift: Arguably, the largest and most positive impact Apple has had on the take space this year was in releasing and open-sourcing their new programming language Swift. Swift is on track to take the development world by storm and benefits greatly from the success of the iOS development platform with the general development community.
IBM Partnership: Apple is not historically the easiest company to partner with but this year they’ve unveiled a partnership with IBM to bring the iOS platform deeper into the enterprise space. This might have some impact but my bet is that most enterprises who are interested in mobile are going to focus on Cordova or other HTML5 based solutions for their line of business development needs. Even in the worst case, the deal with IBM gives Apple some well needed good press.
Sub Apple-Par Products: The Apple Watch was well hyped, enthusiastically covered, and basically a disappointment. Apple Music is… well… not exactly what anyone had hoped and let’s not even talk about the battery case. Their product launches this year have run counter to the usual level of quality we’ve come to expect in terms of fucntional design and user interface design. Also, they still have some serious issues when it comes to cloud services.
Successful as they may be, Apple seems to be have been stumbling in 2015 in terms of product launches while making significant strides with Swift. The Watch felt rushed and I’m hopeful that version two will be a lot more stylish and functional. All in all, Apple might want to revert back to their previous focus and take just a little more care in polishing products before launching them in 2016.
