Is The New Mac App Store the Beginning of a Cultural Revolution?
Two days ago Apple launched the new Mac App Store, a storefront that allows Mac users to download paid or free applications straight to their computers, according to a model that imitates the App Store for iPhone and iPad.
Just one click and the files are available right in your OSX Dock, ready for installation on every Mac in your possession, minus the hassle of downloading them again from the store every time you want to install them on other devices.
So far nothing new. What’s interesting is rather seeing how the Mac App Store will change the habits of users and how it will benefit the desktop software industry. With the iTunes Store, Apple has revolutionized the use and fruition of music content by creating, whereas everyone pictured it impossible because of the unstoppable piracy on the Web, a successful market of several million dollars. Apple has also demonstrated that this business model works and that users are willing to purchase multimedia content even though they are somehow available for free somewhere on the web.
This is not only an economic revolution, but also, and perhaps above all else, a real cultural revolution. In fact, after more than fifteen years it undermines the idea of questioning why one should pay to buy an MP3 file at 99 cents if that same file can be downloaded from the Internet, more often than not illegally, at no cost. This goes for the music but also applies to software in general.
Since its boom, Internet piracy has resulted in huge economic damage with devastating impact in many sectors of the economy. The software industry, along with music and film, has been one of the most affected from the very beginning and has suffered incredibly from this phenomenon. If the Mac App Store will collect the same success of the iOS App Store and it will succeed in having a higher number of users purchasing the software instead of downloading it illegally, a network – as a collective agreement – will emerge, more mature, polite and respectful, way beyond mere economic data.
One wonders why, among the Apple’s rivals, those who could imitate and anticipate the successful model of the App Store did not seize this great opportunity. The reason may be sought in the timing of the operation, not yet mature, or perhaps even more trivially in myopic strategies of Cupertino’s competitors, that in the medium have proven to be a failure.
Until a few years ago the enormous success of Microsoft Windows was also due to the easy availability of software for that operating system. Internet was the perfect “market” for downloading all the applications that a user needed at no cost. Paradoxically, this uneconomic mechanism for the software companies had indirect positive effects for Microsoft and made it a sort of unsinkable battleship.
I think now, things may change.
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- May 8, 2012
All the recent online stores (Apple-Google-Android-etc.) derive from the Synaptic repository system (Linux). The cultural revolution we are living today started within the open source world ;)
To true. As a web developer I see how linux package repositories have served to streamline and consolidate technologies empowering the growth of things like LAMP servers. It ensured that software was stable, up to date, and relatively free of malicious content. The model has also worked well for linux desktops like Ubuntu. I’m not surprised that Apple has taken these ideas and ran with them. It has some compelling benefits.
“Since its boom, Internet piracy has resulted in huge economic damage with devastating impact in many sectors of the economy.”
What do base this statment on? Can you give me a source?
And, like Linux, it never caught on except with geeks in dark rooms ;-)
so when is the music industry gonna investigate Microsoft’s role in the downloading industry?
it’s better to use the expression “cultural revolution”for most important things
Yes you right whit this post, you give in the poing the marketing and way the business its made its changing so lest see what happen because its a new way to do it.
And yes a lot of idea that they have know they are really old but the joke its who of the big company apply it and have success. Linux improve a lot and tryout a lot of thing that other donut do by mean of his environmen so they are good to try things not hit them like a marketing fact, juts couple cases apache and Red hat and might be there that i donut know.
Nice post.
Thanks Hector :)
Nice post indeed. Thanks for sharing.
Ever heard of a little program called Steam? Look it up. Apple isn’t the first at everything.
I would like to point out that the ONLY thing Apple proved about the music business is that when you offer the product for a reasonable price, you will have buyers.
The piracy problem, has always been an issue of developers and content producers blindly selling their product at a price the market was unwilling to bear. At no other time in economic history was it viable to answer the question of “Why is no one buying our product at the price we’re trying to sell it at?” to go and pay millions more to have legislation drafted to suit your market niche’s needs.
That’d be called stupidity (it still is in my book). Music production companies would have found far more buyers, and much less pirating if instead of trying to fight technological revolutions at every step, they had reduced the price of their product, introduced multiple venues through which to purchase it, unbundled their products into singles, etc.
I could probably sit here and come up with plenty of ways to generate more revenue other than “let’s sue our customers and pay millions to have laws written that are more favorable to us.”
Apple only profited off the back of the stupidity of the music industry.
Also, industry reports of piracy’s effects are largely 100% made up. Multiple sources (including the GAO) have stated that it’s nearly impossible to quantify the actual effects of piracy on revenues and job creation. In some cases piracy of music actually increases sales by creating word of mouth about the band.
Believing industry reports about piracy effects is about the same as believing in industry self-regulation.
Yeah, i’ll take Direct 2 Drive over steam, god knows what that thing installs on your computer. As for apple, they’re too much like the gestapo when it comes to their app store.