An island can be defined from the perspective of a species as a space that presents no barriers to the propagation of the species. So from the perspective of a fish, a lake is an island, to the various species of finches on the Galapagos, islands are islands. A mountain top, oasis, valley or the whims of pedigree dog breeders are also islands. And as Dawkins points, out Darwin early on recognized the importance of islands in the process of rise of new specious.
Steven Johnson, the author of the NYT article, Rethinking a Gospel of the Web, uses the word “ecosystem” three times. Mr. Johnson is on to something. I do think that Steve Jobs thought long and hard about the ecosystem into which he was releasing his iPhone. He looked at a world of the Web dominated by the likes of Microsoft, Adobe, and Google, and he thought to himself, “If I open up my beloved iPhone to this world, my new species of applications will never get a chance to gain a toehold. They will get swamped by a hoard of voracious and promiscuous invaders (think rabbits and australia). I will build them an island, and there they will prosper.”
And prosper they did. According to Mr Johnson, more than 150,000 apps have been created in less than two years. And as the app store ecosystem prospers, it is selecting other memes for replication: location awareness, mobility, socially-relevant, media-rich, collaboration-enabled. On his island, Steve Jobs is building an evolutionary stable set.
When will he open the app store? When his ecosystem is impervious to invasion from foreign memes.
