The 4GWE Newsletter will come out today: Me vs. GigaOM?

Carl Ford : 4G: For Generations to Come
Carl Ford

The 4GWE Newsletter will come out today: Me vs. GigaOM?

I hope you are a subscriber...Turns out I have taken a contrarian view from our friend's at Gigaom.  The second paragraph in particular is mind boggling to me.

The App Store is just the latest game changer to come out of Apple's Cupertino labs, and it has been a smashing success. The company today announced that 1.5 billion applications have been downloaded, with the latest 500 million downloads coming since just April. Approximately 65,000 apps are available for more than 40 million App Store-capable devices (the various forms of the iPhone and iPod Touch), and 98 percent of iPhone users have downloaded at least one app. AdMob founder Omar Hamoui thinks the App Store will be a $5 billion business in two years, though it looks like a relatively small number of apps will capture the lion's share of that revenue -- of course, like any consumer industry, advertising helps (subscription required). Some even think the iPhone is the hottest gaming platform out there; the rate at which downloads are growing would excite any investor:

This is just so much KewlAid, I dont know where to start.

First of all, lets segment this a bit better.  I would say the story here is not the store but the device.  After a lunch meeting a friend ask me the advice of should he buy and Iphone or and ITouch.  I told the the Itouch was the answer. 

Apple has made the best handheld game on the market, and if you have to you can justify having it by buying it as a phone.  A pansy way out of having spending the big bucks on a pocketgame.

But when you go the app store what you discover is that of the 65,000 apps the long tail is very long and the good stuff that takes real advantage of the game function is less than 2% (Anyone want to help really quantify this?).

I have called the rest technocrud, but candidly that is giving crud a bad name.

Opportunistic applications are better equated to viruses.  And let me tell you some of them are really annoying.

So if the AppStore turns into a $5Billion dollar business, I will be looking at the Jim Carrey Riddler role in Batman 2 as prophetic.

If you have the ability to deliver things on the Internet why in the world would you allow yourself to be constrained by an app store.

I do give Josh credit for his predictive powers  Two years ago, I predicted Apple would be bigger than Google. It happened in less than a year, though more because Google lost value than because of Apple growing exponentially. I noted that the iPhone was the weakest of Apple's three "tripod" legs: Macintosh, iPod, iPhone. Now, with the iPhone and App Store growing so quickly, it may soon eclipse the Mac as Apple's greatest revenue generator. It makes sense that the company changed its name to Apple Inc.


They are running pretty close in Market Cap right now, but I stand by my position in today's news letter.  The story is not the store.

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