John Siracusa lays out an impressive case for the direction Apple should take. He is dead on, Microsoft is having some difficulties with Longhorn and Apple looks like the darling in everyone’s eyes right now. But Apple has been here before with Copland and stumbled badly, losing the thought leadership position they built in the 80′s in the 90′s. OSX is truly a gem of an OS with some underlying issues, as pointed out by the comments on John’s posting. The essential problem for Apple right now is their future development directions. Microsoft, for all its current problems, has .NET and C#, truly next-generation development platforms/technologies. Right now on the Apple side of the fence you have C++ and Objective-C. Objective-C is a good language, but it shows its age when compared to more recent entries in the development front. What should Apple do? The answer lies in the current crop of dynamic languages, both Python & Ruby (my current favorite) would serve well in this capacity. Apple had a great dynamic language, Dylan, it was pushing way back in the early 80′s but it never went anywhere. Python and Ruby have large robust opensource support with large code libraries for just about anything that a developer could need. A strong move to either (or both) language(s) would be a game changer that would level the playing field. The next few years should be interesting as Apple lets the world in on its plans.
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