Sunday, November 09, 2008

Future lies in Application Platforms


Steve Balmer on application store concept:

"I actually will agree that there's some good work, particularly at Facebook and also with the iPhone, where both of those companies have made it easier for developers to distribute their applications,"

"They've made it easier to kind of get exposure for your applications,There's not much money being made, but the general concept of giving developers a way not only to get their code distributed, but to really get visibility for the code, is a good idea." cnet

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Facebook and iPhone both have incredibly vast networks. The applications that are being built for these products, if successful, receive great visibility, and perhaps pay high dividends.

How does the application store concept translate into products that do not have the same strength in numbers, or the same attractiveness and visibility?

P Palmeiro said...

Hi Dennis,
Could you be more specific when you mean "strenght in numbers" in the second paragraph.
I believe there are some products within Elsevier portfolio (Eg: Science Direct) with strong numbers in terms of visitors, sessions, etc.
Attractiveness is a subjective thing (what may be attractive to you may not be to me. What may be attractive to an Iphone user might not be attractive to a Blackberry user) and visibility also depends on how visible you want to make it (based on Product and Mktg variables)

Rgds!

Dennis said...

I suppose the question I am asking is this:

Are technologists motivated to build applications because they need the applications, or because the will profit from others' use of the applications?

In a market like the iPhone, the creator of a new program could ostensibly make a profit. If that is the case, then the motivation behind building the application is clear. However, would that person have created the high-quality program if his only motivation was that he wanted to use it?