Why haven’t we seen a desktop App Store?


Photo owned by dno1967 (cc)

News broke last night that the iPhone has finally surpassed the Motorola RAZR, the ubiquitous cell, as America’s top-selling mobile phone this quarter. That’s big news. Big, big news. Why? Not only does it mark a major change in the game of user expectations in what constitutes a mobile phone.

It’s easy to wax lyrical about the iPhone’s Multitouch touchscreen technology or the thinking that went into understanding user workflow scenarios like the seamless move from iPod to phone call back to iPod. What’s more interesting is how the App Store and iTunes have changed phone users behaviour from passive to occasional, if not habitual consumers of downloads. Some of which are paid.

It can’t be very long before we every other mobile phone operator/operating system or cooperatives of them combined offering similar Application marketplaces. And much like every other standards war = VHS v Betamax, there will be long drawn out maneuvers. Leaving this aside, can the model of an App Store be moved and used elsewhere?

What the iPhone has given Apple, is the much hallowed Halo effect where Mac sales have picked up. That’s the hardware world. What’s really fascinating to think about, is can a micropayment marketplace take off on the desktop or rather through the desktop? For example, say I was in the market for real photo-editing tool. Something semi-pro. The Devil in me would salivate at pro Photoshop, the Pragmatist shirk. Wouldn’t the jump to downloading and/or renting only those features I use be an easier pill to swallow? How long before I decide I want more of product X? Woo me with features and nab my custom with ease of use and minimal overhead.

Is it very far-fetched to believe that in the near future, I could simply rent pro features off Photoshop on desktop (be through client software or the web). I’m not talking Photoshop Express. No dumbed down features. Perhaps, the industry is waiting on cloud computing to hit that price sweet spot. The potential customers are there. Now, who’ll be the first desktop/desktop-accessible Application Store?

November 11th, 2008 at 10:17 am • Filed in Geekery



Comments

5 Comments to “Why haven’t we seen a desktop App Store?”

  1. Niall Harbison Says:
    November 11th, 2008 at 11:33 am

    Excellent business model and one that I had not thought of before. It is one of those ideas that once you hear it you wonder why the hell nobody had thought of it before! Really good thinking! You would have to think that this could only ever be an Apple play?



  2. Dan Sullivan Says:
    November 11th, 2008 at 12:52 pm

    A lot of shareware gives you the basic functionality you would require to do many things without the massive cost. It is a real pity the major players in software prefer (yes Alexia, I’m looking at your employer but not exclusively mind) to sell us behemoths that cost 100s of yo-yos when we just want the rudimentary functionality that has existed in the product over a decade.

    Truth is the idea of separating out functionality has been thought of before. I worked on a project over a decade ago that was in part trying to do this for the desktop productivity area i.e. Office. Breaking the product down in discrete functionalities as components and then build the overall product back up again from there. Pricing would have mapped to what functionality was actually used. Sadly, there were major problems in doing so, and expectations in terms of performance weren’t met. Frankly as it was big iron organisation I’m not sure that the senior management were able to be as nibble as they need to be in responding to the rapidly changing marketplace. That said a lot of the ideas and even code survived and resurfaced in later products.



  3. Alexia Says:
    November 11th, 2008 at 3:16 pm

    I’m not talking about Shareware, Dan. Rather, well-thought through pay-per-scenario marketplace. Where the apps we know and love reside, in scenario chunks that we can download. Of course, you can imagine the opportunity for small one-man operations competing in the same marketplace too. Opportunities all around.

    You see, I don’t want Shareware on any of my computers. I’m willing to pay for apps in the App Store.

    And I’m not saying the idea hasn’t been thought of before, just that there are no examples of this working successfully. The iTunes App Store proved a market exists. And in the best economic sense, financial rewards go those who have executed and created the best apps.



  4. Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » Fluffy Links - Wednesday November 12th 2008 Says:
    November 12th, 2008 at 5:07 am

    [...] post from Alexia on the idea of a desktop app store. Adobe should be creating one of them for Air developers and Photoshop plugin [...]



  5. Dan Sullivan Says:
    November 12th, 2008 at 11:59 am

    I’m not clear on where you see the great distinction between Shareware which you pay for voluntarily after trying it for a while and the small operators who would sell through the desktop App Store. I’m genuinely surprised that you would say you’d not want any Shareware on any of your machines.

    As for the feasibility of doing it for the desktop that is heavily influenced by the design of the OS and the relationship between the client machine and the service it is dependent on. With the app store, you’ve a client machine which has originated as a device locked into the outside world (and also locked in the more local mundane sense) while the PC/Mac is a device that originated as a standalone that has been opened up to being networked. The premise from an OS viewpoint is still that you should be able to use those machine without being connected at all times. So delivering an app via the app store is linked directly to the specific device. While for PC/Mac, the same link isn’t possible. It’s not impossible to do but it would require considerable changes on the OS side.

    In my tale of prior experience I was replying to Niall who was the one who said “It is one of those ideas that once you hear it you wonder why the hell nobody had thought of it before!” not yourself. I didn’t suggest you had claimed no one had ever thought of it before.



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