Don’t forget Facebook doesn’t make any money. %99.9 percent of this web 2.0 stuff is hyped garbage. Successful businesses solve a problem – they don’t wildly guess what the market might want….that’s what fad chasing twitter heads do.

re: the KP “iFund”, I’m puzzled how venture capital scale investments will be made in iPhone software application developers. Unless they decide to make seed level investments of $250-500k. Those companies aren’t that resource intensive, but more importantly they aren’t going to “grow up” into $200M+ revenue operations. Wish Door would have explained exactly what he is thinking. But it’s great to see something that will stimulate some true Apple-style innovation in the mobile computing market! I just hope the iFund isn’t iHype:)

As to the question of whether iPhone needs the iFund, that is debate-able but I think that from Jobs and company perspective, what they are trying to show is that ‘we get it.’

Understanding big customers like enterprises matters. Cultivating and growing a developer ecosystem matters. And providing enough chum to garner VC interest matters.

I would net this one out as Microsoft playbook meets Cisco playbook tuned for the ‘just add water’ sensibility of the internet age.

Now, when you say, “…any start-up or developer will have its destiny controlled by Apple…I am just trying to understand how a big standalone company will emerge when Apple is going to be gatekeeper,” this belies just how many big companies emerged from the Microsoft ecosystem.

The devil is in the details but I am more optimist than skeptic. Along those lines, I just posted:

Mobile reasons for optimism: http://thenetworkgarden.com/weblog/2008/03/mobile-reasons.html

It’s an attempt to connect the dots between the customer-developer-enterprise-investor-Apple big picture.

Check it out if interested.

Cheers,

Mark

Several people talk about how the iPhone isn’t even the best mobile phone out there, or that Google’s Android will surpass it in a year or two. Do you honestly think that this is the end of the product development lifecycle? They already dropped the price, increased the memory, rolled out 4 software updates, released the SDK, and admitted that the 3G version will launch this year. All in less than a year since it hit the market. You don’t think that this kind of evolution will continue? Remember how the first iPod was derided because it was big and lacked an FM tuner, among other limitations. Then trace the evolution of the entire product line, for which the frequency of new releases increased over time. The iPhone and Mobile OS X platform is likely to follow a similar path. Android may be very good, if it can avoid the pitfalls of having to work with some many different devices. But iPhone is very good, and it works today.

Hopefully Apple’s SDK and toolset for the iPhone will follow a path similar to that for their desktop tools and applications, which have become more open over time.