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

[mikel evins]

On Oct 22, 2010, at 6:04 PM, Raffael Cavallaro wrote:

> 
> 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.

Devs are not a market at all. Devs are a cost center, pure and simple. If Apple thinks it can maintain its brand with fewer devs, then it will do what it can to chase the surplus ones away.