One of the really stunning things about the App Store has always been its ability to get users to actually pay for things — so effectively that some Mac developers have abandoned or are considering abandoning the Mac for the iPhone.
In a way, the app store is sort of the antithesis of the FOSS movement. It seems to be designed around the theory that if you make revenue generation for third-party developers a fundamental feature of your platform (and Apple confirmed in Monday’s earnings call that their acquisition of mobile ad company Quattro was yet another way to “offer developers a seamless way to make more money”), then you get lots of great developers writing lots of great apps for your platform, and great apps attract users. Even if they have to pay for some of them.
Based on the success of the iPhone platform, this theory appears to be a pretty solid one.
We seem to be seeing increasing indications that rather than being a device intended to redefined computing, as I have been speculating, the tablet might instead be primarily be part of an effort to bring the same sort of revenue generation potential to digital distributed textual content, in a way that nobody has been able to do within the context of the web.
(Of course there’s no reason the tablet can’t redefine computing and media. Though the focus we’re seeing on the latter means that if the tablet is also going to attempt to do the former Apple might, as I previously speculated, not be very obvious about this up-front.)
