As someone who forks over real cash each year for an Apple developer license, I am pretty pleased with today’s Apple iPhone SDK announcement. Without question, the iPhone has moved the state of the art, and the SDK will make others work even harder to catch up. We’ve known the SDK announcement has been coming for months, so the real news for me was Apple’s decision to license Active Sync from Microsoft.
It may not be the flashiest part of today’s announcement, but for corporate users of the iPhone, it’s the biggest. Microsoft Exchange is running the majority of corporate email services and the ability to get seamless integration is practically the Holy Grail for iPhone users.
What’s more interesting from a policy perspective, however, is “how” Apple got the licenses for the Active Sync protocols. Despite the fact that Apple is a major competitor for Microsoft, this deal was done without requiring Active Sync to become an “open standard”, no requirement was made that it be done under GPLv3 by a government, and no State Legislature passed a bill.
Nope, it was done the old fashioned way – Apple had a need, Microsoft had a solution, and a deal was struck.
It’s the same way Big Bang Systems, DataViz, Helio, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Remoba, Sony Ericsson, and Symbian got access to Active Sync, and it’s why their phones currently dominate in the business arena.
The fact that Apple and Microsoft can get this deal done says a lot about the current state of licensing – and Government intervention isn’t the answer.