the onda

Amazon opening up the Kindle with an SDK strikes me as an incredibly stupid move, or at the very least, one which is more based on the current wave of hype around SDKs or fear around the impending Apple tablet. Having been part of many "app platform" discussions over the last couple of years, I can't help but feel that most people need to stop reading the iPhone informercials that pass as "analysis" in the tech and business media and remember that most devices really are just appliances and don't need the overhead and potential instability of letting 3rd parties get up close and personal. And that most app efforts require developers, a generally non-bozo crowd that won't sink precious time into things that smell bad just because they looked good on a Powerpoint slide outlining the "stickiness strategy."

For instance, would you want your toilet to have an SDK so that third parties could build apps that listened for the onflush event and did fun things therein?

What really matters is that these connected appliances be extensible in ways that make sense, not that each one brings some new proprietary app environment that developers will have to learn. In the case of the Kindle, Amazon achieved this brilliantly with the "email to Kindle" feature that allowed anyone to send in a list of pre-approved document types for display on the device. I would even argue that for most smartphone platforms, the extensibility should come form the capable HTML5 mobile web browsers that allow for very specific app-like experiences without going down the SDK rathole.

It is app store mania continuing its mad rush, and I for one don't get why we are so ready to jump back into the days of developing with different libraries, toolkits, and operating systems like we did in the pre-web days.