150k apps in the first day, annualized rate of 50m. Apple's annualized rate is about 1b, or 20x that. Not bad.
Like any other platform this one will face chicken and egg problem - developers will not develop until there is profit motive (a big user base willing to use apps and willing to pay for them). Users will not buy until there is a compelling reason - visiclalc for mac, word for wintel etc. This is the assymetric network effect.
Apple side-stepped the problem by offering iTunes integration (so music was the platform-driving "app" for iPod and then the iPhone), slick UI and a sence of elitness that comes standard with white earbuds. This allowed them to build 6m of users over the first year and use that as bait to lure developers in. In all, a non-trivial amount of effort to jumpstart the virtous cycle of platform adoption.
Even having spent as much time on this, Apple had to lean on the iPod franchise to get into the ne market. What can Palm use? I see two things - their exisiting palm app catalog and webkit apps. This isn't cofidence inspiring as it's too late for old apps and too early for the html5.
I was wondering how they were going to handle backwards compatibility on the Pre.
Turns out they left it to a third party; see the last paragraph. Quite sensible if you ask me. Supporting the crufty old Palm OS with it's ancient APIs and 68000 segmented memory space is someone else's problem.
Like any other platform this one will face chicken and egg problem - developers will not develop until there is profit motive (a big user base willing to use apps and willing to pay for them). Users will not buy until there is a compelling reason - visiclalc for mac, word for wintel etc. This is the assymetric network effect.
Apple side-stepped the problem by offering iTunes integration (so music was the platform-driving "app" for iPod and then the iPhone), slick UI and a sence of elitness that comes standard with white earbuds. This allowed them to build 6m of users over the first year and use that as bait to lure developers in. In all, a non-trivial amount of effort to jumpstart the virtous cycle of platform adoption.
Even having spent as much time on this, Apple had to lean on the iPod franchise to get into the ne market. What can Palm use? I see two things - their exisiting palm app catalog and webkit apps. This isn't cofidence inspiring as it's too late for old apps and too early for the html5.
I guess we'll see.