“The thing is, it may take another year or two before [Apple] starts to decline, but it has to – everything does. Everything revolves so much around Steve, and no matter how good his lieutenants are, they’re not Steve. None of us is going to live forever, though I hope he lives for a really long time,” [Hawkins] added.
Trip Hawkins founded Electronic Arts (EA), the world’s largest independent video game publisher. These days he runs Digital Chocolate, which makes games for platforms including iOS. Hawkins doesn’t have it out for Apple – in fact, he makes a point to note “Digital Chocolate’s games will always be in the App Store,” but he thinks that such declines are a natural part of the life cycle of any company or industry.
Hawkins also complains about Apple’s unwillingness to support Flash and Apple’s “closed model;” two familiar complaints from other developers that, to date, haven’t affected Apple’s ability to sell iOS devices very much at all.