I spent the day in a special meeting where we had a former Apple employee share a very interesting story about the development of the original iPhone. It isn't protected by any confidentiality agreements and so I thought I would share it in my blog to help illustrate the point of making proper technology decisions.
Many years ago Apple decided to create a new product called the iPhone. They didn't make phones at the time but had an idea of what smartphones should look like. They had a hardware division that would create the physical device. They also had a software division that needed to build software for this new piece of hardware. The software team had to decide the basic operating system that they would use. One group felt they should take the existing operating system running on their computers and modify it so it would run on the much less powerful hardware. Another group wanted to start with a different operating system that could already run on it.
If you take the short-term approach, there is a lot less work involved in using an operating system that could already run on the planned hardware. The downside is that Apple would then have to maintain separate operating systems for their computer and mobile devices. Taking the long-term approach meant doing more work in the beginning but simplifying maintenance and code updates in the future.
Ultimately the long-term approach won out and proved to be the better decision. This made it much easier for Apple to switch their computers from the Intel platform to the same ARM platform they run in their phones. It also shows that taking a long-term approach opens up more possibilities for future product development.
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