It's weird -- you're the only person in this thread so far that's got the same takeaway from all of this as I have. I was starting to wonder if maybe I missed something.
I've been using and developing on Macs for as long as the Mac has existed, and I've never been more pessimistic about getting in bed with Apple. It's clear that they want to own their entire ecosystem; they want to own the application delivery, they want to own the advertising delivered by it or associated with it, they want to own the hardware and peripherals, they want to own the social atmosphere associated with it, they want to own their customers' data storage ...
And that's fine, for Apple and for their customers. But, I can't imagine any reason why any developer in their right mind would see competing with all of that as anything more than a short-term prospect. If you're successful, Apple will eventually try to own you (either by buying you, or, more likely, rolling out a competing product leveraged by the rest of their ecosystem); if you're not successful, it might not be worth doing in the first place.
Short-term (say, 1 to 2 year) projects can make decent money, and I guess that's good enough for most people, but there's no point to trying to develop longer-term relationships with customers, or branding, or a market of your own.
It's also possible to provide a sufficiently large moat in your product that Apple wouldn't be able move across without some decay in focus. E.g., suppose you created an amazing CAD software for Macs. Not just a 3D sketch, but a heavyweight competitor, analogous to AutoCad or 3DStudioMax.
Apple can't take your lunch without crossing your moat.
I see these addins to the OSX deployment as things that did not have a sufficient moat to cross. And let's face it, if you can build it alone in 6-8 weeks, so can most other hackers, and when a big player comes in, 6-8 weeks is dried peanut shells to them: you lost the game (unless you can move into a niche they won't steamroll over).
As far as building a moat goes, I'm skeptical about whether there's any profitable field that Apple wouldn't, eventually, venture into. I'd agree that it would give you a longer runway, but I don't think it's enough to altogether discourage Apple. Look at where they've gone already: music (in a big way); phones (in a big way); eBooks (in a more failed way); heck, they couldn't even leave well enough alone with the iPad, they decided to market directly to the medical profession and compete one-on-one with startups in that field too.
I betcha that, somewhere on one of Apple's campuses, there are individuals using Pro/E (or similar), and that makes Steve Jobs grind his teeth at night. And, they've got more money than god at this point; like the Eye of Sauron, all they need to do is move their gaze into another market, and they can compete in it.
You're right about the effort required to build a thing, though. I was thinking more along the lines of longtime independent Mac software brands, like Panic.
> It's clear that they want to own their entire ecosystem
Hasn't Jobsian Apple always been like that?
They want white-knuckled control, unless it benefits them to cede a little, and they never remove their hands from the wheel, they just relax the grip a bit. But they're always spring-loaded to grasp it back.
This was my biggest hesitation in switching from PC to Mac as a personal usage platform: the controlling nature worried me. A couple years after switching it still bugs me, but not enough to act as a deterrent.
It's possible that Jobs' Apple has always wanted to be this way, but it's only in the last decade or so that they've been able to gather the momentum to pull it off. With the prospect of the Mac App store taking over all software delivery in the near future, it's now enough deterrent for me.
I've been using and developing on Macs for as long as the Mac has existed, and I've never been more pessimistic about getting in bed with Apple. It's clear that they want to own their entire ecosystem; they want to own the application delivery, they want to own the advertising delivered by it or associated with it, they want to own the hardware and peripherals, they want to own the social atmosphere associated with it, they want to own their customers' data storage ...
And that's fine, for Apple and for their customers. But, I can't imagine any reason why any developer in their right mind would see competing with all of that as anything more than a short-term prospect. If you're successful, Apple will eventually try to own you (either by buying you, or, more likely, rolling out a competing product leveraged by the rest of their ecosystem); if you're not successful, it might not be worth doing in the first place.
Short-term (say, 1 to 2 year) projects can make decent money, and I guess that's good enough for most people, but there's no point to trying to develop longer-term relationships with customers, or branding, or a market of your own.