[Openmcl-devel] Mac App store: will CCL apps fly?

Raffael Cavallaro raffaelcavallaro at mac.com
Fri Oct 22 17:04:45 PDT 2010


On Oct 22, 2010, at 7:35 PM, Sudhir Shenoy wrote:

> Everyone is assuming that people will not buy applications that are not in the Mac App store. But is this really true?

I think you may be missing the thrust of Ron's (and my) assessment. Apple will make non-app-store apps go away by making Mac OS X qua consumer OS go away. They will migrate all of their consumer customers to hardware that comes with the moral equivalent of iOS pre-installed. Whether this moral equivalent of iOS is called iOS or not doesn't matter - it will be locked down just like iOS is now.

So 90+% of Apple desktop/laptop/netbook/tablet buyers will never bother to go to the trouble of installing a full UNIX on their hardware. Devs will still do so (or even worse, there will be an iOS app available to registered devs only that is a version of XCode with just enough power to develop iOS/Mac OS X LOLCat apps). But devs are not a large enough market to keep a tool that only devs use a central focus of Apple's OS development. Mac OS X qua UNIX will wither much like MPW did in the days when CodeWarrior was the preferred tool for developing commercial Mac software. Mac OS X as UNIX will continue to be available, but it will be commercially irrelevant, and being commercially irrelevant, no one will bother to develop commercial software for it.

warmest regards,
Ralph


Raffael Cavallaro
raffaelcavallaro at me.com








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