Brij Singh's Blog

Lot of people just stop at iPhone and iPad while discussing how Apple has changed rules of the software industry. It’s curated software store – App Store – has always been in the background. Apple talks about it during marketing events, press and bloggers give it slightly more respect than iTunes and Apple haters talk mostly in the context of it’s controversial app rejections.

Lot of analysts missed out on it’s far reaching impact to traditional software sales cycle. App Store, via it’s tight enforcement of human interface guidelines and approval processes, has for the first time standardized how customers evaluate and download vendor apps. Enterprise sales cycle still stinks. Consumer web services is in many ways is a hit and miss game. Both enterprise sales and consumer web are largely geography dependent. You need to be near your customer base or be surrounded by believers.

In that context App Store is a different beast. It allows anybody to join the sales party as long as you have good value and good app experience. Apps are on mobile handset, so they have to have small footprint, design and experience is enforced by Apple guidelines so overall developers cannot mess up too much. Bulky and bloated apps get rejected fairly quickly. This snackware type of apps are allowing developers from remote parts of the world to enjoy successful presence on the App Store. From anywhere in the world! John Boudreau, on Mercury News, is writing about one such successful party:

In less than half a year, Rye Studio has sold one million downloads of traditional Chinese children’s stories apps at 99 cents each for the iPad and iPhone. Lu bought a courtyard home in the city’s tech hub Haidian District and converted it into a playful office with a giant replica of a Michelangelo painting and a bamboo garden. And he hired workers in three cities — Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu — to develop software, video and music.

It’s been close to one year that we have been dabbling with App Store dynamics. Once app gets approved and it’s on the App Store, stat which fascinates me most is the geographic spread of our client base. They are all over the globe.

And few of these apps we have developed/submitted while on the road. What our limited experience has taught us that rules have changed in a significant way. If Open Source, with it’s try and tinker approach, changed how IT organizations adopted new software, App Stores are going to change how productivity apps gets procured by LOBs. Apple App Store is first of it’s kind, Microsoft, Amazon and Google are already running with their own distribution outlets. Very soon there will be new variations on this App Store model.

What all this means to a software start-up holed up in some small corner of the world is this: think about an innovative idea, develop fast, put it on the App Store, make money, and repeat the process with better quality. For the first time in recent software industry, Davids can successfully fight against Goliaths. Within India, I have seen successful start-ups come from small towns like Ahmedabad, Mangalore, Pondicherry, and Kanpur to name few. This trend will just continue and that will bring lot of new talent to the pool. It’s going to be exciting.

App Stores are the biggest disruption to software sales since Google AdWords and we are just getting started. Next generation of Skype, ICQ, Twitter etc will come from faraway places. Get used to it and also get used to the new accent