Hacking: the sign of a moving market

There's a fairly reliable indicator of a product that's on its way to becoming a massive hit. I saw it with the original IBM PC, the Apple Macintosh, and the Palm Pilot. What's the indicator? When people take a product and turn it into a platform, racing to create new applications and new ways to use the system, the odds are pretty good that there's going to be a robust market for some time to come. I'm reminded of this because I've been asked (forced?) to sit through several demonstrations of the new apps applied to a friend or colleague's iPhone. The threat of a phone turned into a useless hunk of metal and plastic isn't enough to shut down the excitement over the iPhone's potential as a mobile communications and computing platform. Sure, users are upset about the recent software-based lobotomy performed on their phones, but most are still planning to continue working to make the iPhone uniquely theirs.

Apple went through something akin to this in the early days of the Macintosh. Jef Raskin's vision was a platform so simple and useful that no one could improve it by hacking. The vision was compelling, but it ultimately surrendered to the overwhelming need for people to take something they love and try to make it better. I suspect that Apple will ultimately bend to the people's will when it comes to the iPhone, and we'll see an amazing explosion of applications that take advantage of the iPhone's unique capabilities and interface. In the meantime, we'll just have to be ready to un-brick our iPhones on a regular basis. -Curtis