Let’s face it. If you can support selling 5 GB downloads (which Apple does in the form of movies) through your e-commerce solution, iTunes, then there’s certainly no intrinsic barrier to doing so with applications, or drivers, or other forms of digital content. If we fail to think of applications as content, we fail in our understanding of content. Yet here we are thinking it’s a bold new idea to license and sell application software online–fully confining the novelty of such a thing to the mobile space. Heh, we’re smart.
An old friend, Fleecy Moss, who was among the architects of the independent takeover of Amiga in the early 2000’s, once gave a talk at a tradeshow in the nineties–and his espousal of the content designation to software was, at the time, a revolutionary concept. As with many ideas that bubbled up from the ill-fated Amiga wellspring, this concept proved true, and was ahead of its time. It would be another ten years before the idea was accepted by the greater community.
The app store paradigm has brought this idea to the forefront of the way we think about distributing content. Yet there’s something holding up the adoption of online app stores to distribute software, and I can’t quite thumb it. Shareware authors have been distributing license credentials through e-commerce sites for a decade already, yet Apple and Microsoft still don’t sell their developers’ software through their flagship web sites.
Perhaps even more silly is the fact that consumers, vis-a-vis bloggers, don’t already demand such a solution. If I can buy and download a DRM’d episode of Lost, why can’t I download a credentialed, licensed copy of Squeeze, or Microsoft Office for Mac, or my favorite blogging application, Ecto? Yet nobody complains. Indeed, it seems that the idea of a desktop app store is some kind of new idea. Technologizer, the “smarter take on tech”, just ran a piece about it today. Yet I was talking about it a year ago, and longer.
