

Come 2010, the battle of the App Stores is just beginning.. - nc
http://kbm1.posterous.com/

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kiba
Whenever there are lot of money, there tends to be a lot of developers
competing for the cash.

The only question is how do you become a positive statistical outliers in a
crowded market?

~~~
andrewljohnson
Making money in the App Store is about as easy as using an ATM machine.

~~~
kavinbm
Care to enlighten us on why you think so?

~~~
andrewljohnson
Because I make money, and I have several friends who make money.

It's really a great market, with people actually willing to pay for software.
You just have to jump through a few of Apple's hoops.

------
Tichy
"Motorola itself is expected to launch between 20-30 Android based phones
globally this year."

So Apple's competitors still don't get it :-(

~~~
dejb
Well someone doesn't get it. In the 80s it was Apple running exactly the same
play as they are trying now. Turns out the power of variety and multiple
manufacturers prevailed over 'Your new model for this year will be'. Wonder
what makes you think it will be so different this time.

~~~
colinplamondon
Pricing. The Macintosh was too expensive, the iPhone is dirt cheap at $100
subsidized.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Precisely.

The history of personal computing since the eighties does have something to
teach us about "the power of variety". It teaches us that consumers don't rate
variety very highly compared to consistency, software compatibility and --
above all -- price. In the early 1980s there was a wide variety of
microcomputer operating systems and hardware platforms to choose from. Today,
we are down to two operating systems, broadly speaking -- Windows and Unix --
and pretty much one PC hardware platform, built around commodity x86
processors and their associated commodity motherboards and peripherals.

Commodity PCs grew to dominate the market because they were a _commodity_ ,
which is another way of saying that they were _essentially all the same_. For
a while you couldn't even get them in a different _color_ ; if you didn't like
beige you had to go buy some spray paint and mod your own case. If you bought
a PC you knew that it would support a standard monitor and a standard PC mouse
and a standard PC keyboard and would run Microsoft Excel if you wanted to pay
the standard price for the standard-issue operating system.

The major reason why PC manufacturers proliferated so wildly was price, but
that battle is largely over: Twenty-five years of price wars and middleman-
elimination, aided by the internet, have done their work, and now literally
everybody has their hardware built by Foxconn or some other company within
half an hour's bicycle ride of Foxconn, and it all costs roughly the same
feature-for-feature. It's just a different world than it used to be.

~~~
dejb
> It teaches us that consumers don't rate variety very highly

You are making the same mistake with regards to competition as communism does.
In retrospect it is easy to look back and say what 'consumers' wanted but that
ignores the competative pressures that lead to the emergence of the 'winner'
solutions. Consumers do not need to be aware of the power of variety to
benefit from it, although collectively they do have a great 'variety' of
differing needs.

Of course the system the won out was the one to fostered the greatest levels
of competition within that system, using standards and interoperability to
facilitate this.

> The major reason why PC manufacturers proliferated so wildly was price, but
> that battle is largely over:

Seriously the era of innovation in computer hardware is over? The whole thing
just runs like clockwork now and no further major disruptive forces will
change the industry? I'm sure in the 70s you would have predicted that IBM
would rule the industry forever.

