title: The Mac App Store and Exposure category: article link: date: 24/01/2011 timestamp: 2011-01-24 12:35:33.778152 -07:00
After reading the guest post by Phil Libin on Techcrunch about his experience with the Mac App store, it struck me as odd that it took this long for an official "store" to be released on a desktop platform. I know it seems that good ideas are always a long time coming, but how did everyone (Microsoft) but Apple miss the boat on this? Phil, like many of us, thought Evernote's success could only be attributed to the rise of smartphone adoption. But in reality it was attributed to exposure and a centralized location for people to actually find the app.
To me, at least, it seems the Internet has been around forever. In reality it is still in its infancy: It's a jungle, its the Wild Wild West. Ordinary people still don't know where to find great software in this wilderness. As a society we have grown accustomed to specialized brick-and-mortar stores where we know we can find what we're looking for. Imagine if Wal-Mart didn't exist and instead every product was sold on the streets in fixed but seemingly abstract locations? Before Apple introduced the App Store this is how software was bought and sold online. For most people if they couldn't find your software in a box and on a shelf, they weren't buying it...but not because they didn't want it but rather because they couldn't find it.
Evernote more than doubled its number of new users after the debut on the MAS. That's because, as Mr. Libin puts it:
It isn't mobile that's overwhelmingly important, it's the app store.
UPDATE: I received a response about including apt-get in this discussion. I responded that if we follow the analogy apt-get would be the brick-and-mortar equivalent of the Goodwill. There are a few gems amongst the junk, but you're on your own and you may have to fix the stuff yourself.