Danger Dooming Itself

I was excited to hear that Dan­ger would soon open a devel­oper site. The license agree­ment seemed OK except for the following:

8. Prod­uct WARRANTY Invalid. Devel­oper Acknowl­edges and agrees that the down­load of any soft­ware (includ­ing licensed tech­nol­ogy) onto or tam­per­ing with any t-mobile side­kick or other dan­ger hip­top device shall inval­i­date the lim­ited prod­uct war­ranty applic­a­ble to any such device.

Basi­cally, what they are say­ing here is “Hey, you use a Dan­ger device for devel­op­ment, then kiss your war­ranty good­bye, even if its because of our own code”. This is very sad and one would expect more sup­port from a com­pany try­ing to fos­ter a devel­oper com­mu­nity. This por­tion seems short-sighted at best.

The next thing is the con­cept of Devel­oper dol­lars. Basi­cally, you’re given some scrips. Ask a ques­tion and spend them, answer a ques­tion and get new ones. So if you’re just inter­ested in devel­op­ing apps and, when you run into a prob­lem, ask ques­tions in the forum, you will have to pay for it. A sig­nif­i­cant quote from their site again:

If you ever run out, you’ll always be able to pur­chase more Devel­oper Dol­lars with cold hard cash.

Now that’s not very reas­sur­ing. How about just let­ting peo­ple be. The basic con­cept is to incen­tivize peo­ple but some­times, ques­tions are more impor­tant than answers. If I ask a ques­tion about the prod­uct that pro­vokes other devel­op­ers into a debate over an imple­men­ta­tion issue, isn’t that of some value?

But it doesn’t stop there. There’s more! Dan­ger breaks down its devel­op­ment com­mu­nity into three groups: Inter­ested, Trusted, and Seri­ous. The inter­ested par­ties have access to docs only and are not allowed to post in forums. The trusted devel­op­ers have either a valid tmail.com address (ie. they own a dan­ger device) or work for a com­pany that does wire­less devel­op­ment. This last group is the first group to have access to a sim­u­la­tor SDK What does that mean? Well, basi­cally, if you are a hob­by­ist, and do not own a dan­ger device, for­get devel­op­ing for it. You don’t get an SDK, you don’t get to dis­cuss with other inter­ested devel­op­ers. It seems to me that this cre­ate a closed com­mu­nity. As a result, Dan­ger is essen­tially giv­ing up on the pos­si­bil­ity of hav­ing thou­sands of devel­op­ers cre­ate new appli­ca­tions for their device.

This is the kind of mis­take that oth­ers (Palm, Microsoft) have not made and, con­sid­er­ing that the Dan­ger OS is a pro­pri­etary one, leaves lit­tle change for the device to suc­ceed in the long run. Ulti­mately, new hard­ware suc­ceeds only if it is open enough to let peo­ple develop new soft­ware for it.

With their restric­tive approach, Dan­ger may be killing its own poten­tial in the mar­ket­place. A real shame con­sid­er­ing how many hob­by­ists like myself were hop­ing to be able to offer new stuff on it.

Last but not least, my inter­est in the Dan­ger was from the web end. If I had access to a Dan­ger emu­la­tor with the Dan­ger browser, I could make sure that pages on this site would be opti­mized for it. Dan­ger decided that it didn’t care about such thing. Too bad for them, and too bad for Dan­ger users.