Monday’s WWDC keynote showed how a company can introduce no new paid products and yet still show exactly how its platforms are the most robust and vibrant on the market today.
First of all, Apple is basically fixing almost everything its users have said is broken in iOS and OS X. Second, it’s bringing its feature set up to near parity with Android with a slew of new APIs. Finally, it showered developers with new back-end features, business models and opportunities and, out of nowhere, an easier to use programming language.
The response from developers was, as you’d imagine, positive to the point of ecstatic. Not only was Apple making their jobs easier, it was potentially making them more lucrative. What’s not to like?
Naturally, the usual collection of slower students in the class, who constantly furrow their brows in a vain attempt to understand what the company is doing, came out to play.
Let us go to one Henry Blodget:
So, basically, Apple didn’t announce anything?
Yes, it’s astounding that, at its developers conference, Apple only announced things for developers.
Of course, that’s just Blodget being Blodget. Would you ask a flamingo to stop being pink? Well, you might if it kept yelling “BLUE IS DEAD IN THE WATER.”
Another person who didn’t quite get Monday’s announcements was Haunted Empire author Yukari Kane:
Well… that may have been the most tepid response I’ve seen to a #wwdc keynote in the last six years.
In her defense, she was watching the keynote with her cats.
Her cats who are Android developers.
Her cats who are Android developers based on a philosophical devotion to the platform.
Basically, her cats are malware developers is what the Macalope is saying.
No, more likely Kane was sitting with a bunch of mainstream business journalists, who know exactly Dan Lyons about software development. There really is but one translation of this tweet and that is “I do not understand what Apple announced. At all. Now please slap me upside the head with a carp.” It’s not really surprising that a woman who wrote a book based on the premise “I don’t understand Apple!” is able to bang out a tweet based on the premise “I do not understand this WWDC keynote!”
Meanwhile, these two tweets come via Macworld’s own Dan Frakes, who correctly summed up the event:
The amount of new stuff in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite is just crazy. Anyone saying this keynote is disappointing needs their head examined.
Alas, the Macalope thinks it’s going to take an intervention of epic proportions to get Blodget and Kane the kind of head-examining they need.