There has been a lot of coverage in the last 12 months or so about the impact that “Apps” are having on the world. Most of the attention has been focused on the mobile world, but already today there are a number of competing marketplaces for the sale and/or distribution of software to different platforms.
As well as the well publicised iOS App Store, the Android Market (not to mention competitive marketplaces from Amazon for Android, as well as some hardware manufacturers getting into the game as well), the Windows Phone Marketplace and the BlackBerry App World, there is an in-browser marketplace for the Chrome browser (presumably a pre-emptive move for Chrome OS for which hardware is releasing soon), a MacOS App store, business applications in places like the Google Apps Marketplace, and unsubstantiated rumours about similar functionality within the next iteration of Windows. Hell, even my Samsung TV has an app store built in these days.
The economic impact of this new model for software delivery is interesting. On the one hand, with generally percentage-based commission on sales, it gives a level-ish playing field for software developers of all shapes and sizes to get their products out to market. There feels to be something of a gold rush feel still as bedroom developers bid to become the new Rovio.
Developers for (at this stage mobile) apps appear to drop into one of three broad categories (my terminology coming up…):
Entrepreneurs (or budding entrepreneurs), who are developing Apps in an attempt to get rich; these people are often professional programmers by day, and see this as an opportunity to build an additional (or alternative) income over time;
Altruists who are developing apps from the open source/wiki/creative commons “for the good” perspective;
Hired hands who are developing apps for third parties, either as potential revenue generators, as value-add to a companies customer proposition, or as a marketing tool.
It will be interesting to see how the proportional balance of those types of development will move around over time as marketplaces develop for different platforms, but one thing to note will be if marketplaces offer the ability for non-IT companies to more easily monetise Line of Business applications that they have developed in house. Bunging a, say, Azure app into an open marketplace, is a far less daunting proposition than selling and marketing a software app developed today…
From an IT management perspective, however, it's yet another way in which the forces of Cloud, Consumerisation and Commoditization are punching great big holes into accepted models for IT governance and management. I am very glad that I no longer have responsibility for manaing large numbers of Macs now that a marketplace is built into that OS…
mmitII 