Apple · maker of iPhone and Mac
Stop bundling your own apps and spin them off so outside developers can compete
About a decade of few built-in apps; third-party apps like PageMaker credited with saving the Mac
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What they did
After launching the Mac with MacWrite, MacPaint and MacDraw, Apple stopped bundling them in 1986 because they competed with third-party developers, and in 1987 spun them into the Claris subsidiary to keep them at arm's length. For roughly 1986-1996 the Mac shipped with very few first-party apps (no built-in address book) so those categories stayed open to third parties.
What happened
A thriving third-party ecosystem grew (PageMaker, Illustrator, Photoshop); Gruber says shipping almost no first-party apps is not the right way to run a platform either, and Apple later swung back to bundling its own apps.
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