Bijan Sabet

The Mac App Store

Last week Apple annouced their plans for the Mac App Store.

It makes perfect sense. Apple has well over a hundred million users with credits card info with iTunes and they have a proven software distribution model for iPhone and iPad.

I was talking to my brother about the Mac App Store last week. He believes that at some point the App Store will be the only way to install native apps on future Macintosh computers.

Since then I’ve heard others express this concern and belief as well.

Call me naive, but I just don’t see it that way. First, the open web is much more compelling than any Mac OS X app for the most part. My latest two Mac’s don’t have any MSFT software and the main native app I use is Chrome and Firefox. I keep Apple Pages, Keynote and Numbers as a backup if Google apps barf. I gave up on Entourage and Apple mail many moons ago.

Ryan Block makes the point nicely in his recent post:

The real issue with the desktop software market is that (unless you’re talking about productivity software) there just isn’t all that much consumers need to buy anymore. The boxed software business didn’t die because of app stores, it died because of an overabundance of great programs that are free, open, or otherwise subsidized that are available through other web or internet services. To put it another way: lately, how often have your parents bought software for their computer (that wasn’t Microsoft Office)

The opposite is true on my iPhone. Even though I’m a preacher for the open web & html5, the reality is right now, I use a ton of iPhone apps and prefer many of them over their web counterparts (regardless the platform). I wish this wasn’t true but it is.