The age of feature consolidation has arrived for big product companies. Apple launched the iPhone OS4 SDK a couple of days ago, Twitter acquired Tweetie and today Twitter announced at the Chirp conference that they will launch their own url shortening service in place of bit.ly One pattern that has emerged out of these is that product companies are now ready to throw the kitchen sink at the user. Another pattern is that product companies are now making their platforms “unique” and hence forcing it upon everyone. Is this the time for feature consolidation?

While Apple maintains the incremental feature upgrade strategy with the iPad hardware (read no camera, no video conferencing, no flash support), it certainly thinks the iPhone is worth the truckloads of features users have been asking for after 3 long years. On the other hand, Twitter has gone for complete dominance. By making Twitter’s own url shortening service “mandatory” if you want to use twitter it is killing off any other url shortening service out there. Apple’s new developer agreement restricting them to creating apps using Apple’s platform does something similar. The twit_adacquisition of Tweetie also plugs a hole in the Twitter product – desktop and mobile clients. Both Apple and Twitter have also thrown in hard-to-turn-down advertising platforms since both seem to hate Google’s dominance in that area.

Another take away from these episodes of hole-plugging is that these companies now have products that has gone past the tipping point. No one can stop using these products, leave alone switch to new ones which do the job as well as these do. The next logical step is to bring users and developers into platforms that give them a single window access to everything you needed. Period. You may call it arm twisting but companies call this “higher profits”. Of course these moves come with the threat of law suits but who cares as long as these companies keep making profits for their share holders. What it also means is that the products have matured so much as to make way for new ones (read iPhone 4G and a super Twitter). What we feel bad about is that hapless developers get treated badly after the party is over. Sounds and feels more like greed, not feature consolidation.

Related Posts