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

[Scott L. Burson]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 5:04 PM, Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavallaro at mac.com
> 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.
>

While it's natural for us as hackers to look at the downside of this, I
think it's worth pointing out that there's an upside: most people will
indeed be much better off in Apple's walled garden.  It's a bold strategy,
worthy of His Steveness, and I think it's going to work, frankly.

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.
>

So MacOS will wind up pretty much where Linux is now: the choice of many
developers and a few power users.  I'm not even sure how much I'll mind
that, personally.  Though I'm quite fond of my Powerb^W MacBook Pro, I do
most of my development on Linux anyway.

-- Scott
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