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

[Sudhir Shenoy]

On Oct 23, 2010, at 9:04 AM, 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.

This is, of course, possible if Apple thinks that the general purpose computer is dead (or a market they do not want to be in). I don't see how it could possibly work otherwise. Mac OS X does not have the market share of ipods/iphones/ipads to entice thousands of developers to develop solely for that platform.

So if your analysis of the future is correct, it simply means that Apple will get out of the computer business and concentrate on computers as appliances. However, if this is their true goal, why set up a Mac App store in the first place?

Cheers
Sudhir