Mobile devices are the future. Whether it be iPads, smart phones, netbooks, or whatever device we will use to access “the cloud” in five years, and we probably won’t care as much about desktops or even laptops as we do now. That’s old news, but it’s yet to be seen what that news means for the traditional big hitters in the tech world, and how those big hitters will keep up with a rather dramatic market shift. Apple was the first to the market by a year or two, really, and they paved the way for the app market structure: an iphone on 3G showed the world how easily we could do without our desktops, and pointed software towards the grave. Soon the days of software developed by teams of engineers over multi-year development cycles, “mastered” and sent to a manufacturer to mass produce to send to physical stores around the world would be gone… Our mobile devices, of which it seems we can’t get enough right now, run on applications – they aren’t “finished”, but constantly and quickly updated. An excellent piece by Ben Horrowitz on the Economist website pointed out that advances in programming languages greatly reduce the number of hours it takes to create a strong piece of software, and along with a whole host of other reasons (faster wireless, cheaper phones/tablets, end of closed development platforms), applications are how 90% of consumers will get 90% of their content in the future.
This year will go down in history as the year where the big tech companies realized that the future was in application markets, and where every single one of them entered the fray. News came yesterday of “Project Spartan” (lame codename), a Facebook HTML5-based application market, designed to run on any web-capable device (aka the iphone). This joins Amazon’s app market, already running on a bunch of devices, and obviously Google’s Android market and the original “app market” by Apple. As we learned in the original computer boom, only one (or two) of these operating syst… I mean app markets… can survive. Every technological platform reduces to 1-2 main competitors eventually; just look at computers [mac/pc], operating systems [windows/OS], smartphones [iphone/android… sorry blackberry!], video game consoles [xbox/playstation]… It’ll happen in app markets too. Does Facebook’s inherent social advantage mean it can take on Apple and Google with their giant headstarts and hardware presence? Can Amazon do anything to parlay their advantage in moving physical goods and their relationships with distributors into something app users care about? Can Barnes and Noble turn a pretty solid device (the nook) into something that won’t be a historical relic in 2 years? Is Microsoft gonna uncharacteristically sit this round out, or is the Kinect their app market?
begun the app market wars has.
danielmarkmiller.net 