Store Wars – Part I: From Mac Plus to iPhone

The Dutch summer of 1986 had less than 15 sunny days in total. I spent most of these at the Apple Mac Service center. After a 30 minutes bicycle ride, I would spend 2 to 3 hours copying applications and games from the local Ethernet onto the 3 guilder ($2 USD) per piece floppy disks for my first personal computer: the Mac Plus.

23 years later, I’m still a “side-loader”. Almost daily I download applications for my iPhone through iTunes on my MacBook. Apple managed to shake up an entire industry with a brilliant concept: 1 device, 1 software platform and 1 channel. Its success has led to an accelerated maturation of the mobile device as an application platform. With more than 1 billion downloads it is certainly the winner in terms of mobile application stores. But how sustainable is this position really?

Soon after the iPhone announcement in 2007, most mobile phone manufacturers realized they had been too comfortable for too long. Nokia was one of the first to announce its own mobile application store for its smartphones and BlackBerry soon followed suit. Today, most handset manufactures have started their own stores, including Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Palm and even LG albeit in just in Korea. Although Apple proves you can make money of the sales of applications, most are using the applications to drive handset sales.

But it’s not just handset manufactures that want a piece of the pie. The operators are realizing that in order to avoid becoming a “dumb pipe” they too need to provide value added services. In the past couple of years online billing plus invoice specification did the trick, but these days the operators need to participate in the mobile applications “store war” in order to stay in the race for the consumer’s heart (and wallet).

The Web2Mob Store Wars series will focus on the power struggle between handset manufacturers, operators and developers. I will address issues regarding software compatibility, bandwidth, emerging markets, the mobile web, developer communities and lots more. Stay tuned.