Yep that is the choice I guess. It is along the lines of the Apple ecosystem though: limited selection: people trust apple to build a solid system at a few different price points for them. They don't expect 20 options for video cards, harddrives, processors etc. A couple choices of each is usually all they are given. The store promised a safe AND easy place to find apps for your device. It has done a reasonable job at the first point but the clutter makes the second one next to impossible. Type VLC you'll get dozens of options only one/a few of which are true VLC the rest just let you stream from your media server. The effort involved in reading all those descriptions even when you had a pretty good idea of what you are looking for in the first place is painful, add to that the chance that you might be paying for each attempt to get what you want and then the store is doing a big disservice to customers: it isn't exactly like you have a returns department or any sort of support for a lot of these apps.

But that is the solution you've chose when you chose to force people to use your store to sell/buy for your devices. By operating the store/setting the bar to entry you are implicitly choosing what should be there. Walmart doesn't sell anyone's crap even online. At some point you have to say we have n types of cereal any more will just be clutter. If you are the n + 1 guy trying to enter the store you are screwed but that is part of determining if you have a business and not just a "me too" product you felt like hacking together on a weekend.

Why do developers have a right to build whatever they want on your platform? If your platform is closed like Apple is they/you don't: get over it. If they don't want a Playboy App it won't exist. If they don't want to support Flash it won't exist. Etc. If you don't like it build for windows or linux, make it a web app instead etc. If your app is really that good it will help people move away/encourage these closed stores to be opened up.

I agree. All app stores I've seen do this. Some just have Games all together, some go one level deeper: games -> puzzle. What is needed is games->puzzle->"like" minesweeper. To keep the subcategories small I'd suggest limiting the number of apps. Sorry we've reached our limit of 20 Tetris like games please do something original.

Allow at most say 10 apps in a particular niche (say todo lists). Any app older than 2 years goes away (or are really buried like you don't get them in searches you have to page though them at 20 apps a page till you find them). You can still access it if you've purchased it in the past but it no longer is available for viewing/new downloads. New submissions with minor changes from existing apps are not accepted (ex: yet another tetris clone with different music or point system). There needs to be a balance between choice and chaos: you don't see every plumber in the country in the phone book because only a few are relevant to you. Similarly with software, to a lesser extent perhaps but still true: there is only so many ways to keep a list of things that makes sense when using a finger sized input device. Keep a few options and dump all the new skin clones.

If you are going to offer a curated store of apps for your platform you should really curate: pick the best or best examples of different approaches to the space and dump the rest.

I agree. I'm often okay but the thought of putting my own thermal paste on a $1000 CPU and hitting the power switch kind of frightens me. I get paid well the money I can save picking out the parts and building my own I could have made in the same amount of time doing something I'm good at. I didn't get a masters degree so I can be the guy with the wrench in his hand.

No I'm thinking sub saharan africa, Malaysia etc. The Indian middle class is still poor in terms of people I want to get money from (maybe if I was living there selling into the market wouldn't be an issue). But (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2327182/The-myth-great-Indian-Middle-class-Roughly-30-Indias-population-lives-poverty-line.html) the world bank calls middle class $2-20 a day so even at the high end we are talking people making $600 a month. I pay about that a month for my commute to work. MS might get some money out of these countries but it won't be anything like the Windows business in its hayday did.

HDD space is cheap too tough, ~$0.50 a DVD uncompressed. Compressed it is pennies. I don't need the greatest image quality for almost all movies (say romantic comedies, normal dramas, etc). The few CGI droole factories that come out every year sure I can see wanted the best quality because that to be honest is 90% of the plot of Transformers/X-Men etc.

DVD not going the way of the dodo: I don't know game consoles are having a relative hard time (yeah they are selling well now but only because they went what 7 years between updates?). People getting Netflix and such. Internet getting faster and faster (I'm getting 150 at home and can get 350Mbps if I wanted it) streaming is going to be the way things go. A lot of laptops ship now without a disk drive. In a few years I suspect desktops will go the same way. You'll be stuck looking for old game consoles or DVD players in 10 years I think because nothing you get will come with a way to read physical media anymore.

Yeah and so does everyone that makes both. Desktop/laptop is still a large market though. My understanding is Macbook has the largest market share of all models. That said I'm sure it helps that apple has very few models vs something like Dell or Lenovo. But 5M very expensive items at 30%+ profit margin still makes a good dent in anyones profit/loss.

It's funny it is kind of the Mac v PC battle of the late 80's-90's. Platform wins. I have a Lumina 920 and it is a great phone. Win phone is fun to use. But ...: not a lot of apps for it. Not that I care much. I'm not into social media crap or a dozen other things. What it does really well right out of the box: hotmail, gmail, facebook contacts all automatically merged (after logging into the relevent apps of course) and shown in one place. It doesn't matter if someone's hotmail has their phone number but their mailing address is only saved on there FB page: it all shows up in the same contact. Dido: things like birthday's and holidays: automatically figured out and notified.

That is pretty much all I needed from a phone: contacts in one place and access to FB for the 1-2 times a month I actually check it. But: I am not the typical smartphone user. MS missed the cool factor boat by a couple years and now have to bribe people (sometimes literally by supplying in house devs to help support a big name app get ported to the platform) to develop for it. Since people aren't sure if they can find the app they want on WinPhone they just go for an Android or iPhone. Them giving out WinPhone for free now will maybe get them a better market share in the low end phones for the developing world but: if you are giving away the software what is the point being in the business? (If you are hoping on making money on selling apps you don't want the entry level 3rd world population as your customer base either).

Realize replying to an anon so not likely to see this but: do you think DVD players will be around in 10 years? If so how much of a pain will it be to get it hooked up to your tv/computer? When is the last time you've dusted off a VHS player to watch an old movie?

Everyone's different but generally I only want to see a movie once. Most movies I don't care about and the few I feel I must watch because of cultural relavence: Star Wars, Star Trek, Batman, LoTR etc are so main stream that I'll have hundreds of choices of where to download them for years and years to come. The rest I pretty much don't care if I miss the latest Seth Rogen movie: if I can get it cool if not I'll watch something else.

Not to mention the worst part of discs: having to get off your ass every couple hours to swap out discs. Add to that the clutter of a bunch of discs around, people with bad habits like stacking them on top of each other outside of the case, putting them in the wrong case, touching them with their fingers etc.Inconvenient, clutter and easily damaged/obsoleted when the players go away. Time to go. I don't know why I bothered but a few years back I bought a bluray player. I've rented exactly one video to try it out. Since then I just use my 150Mbps internet connection and creativity. Don't have to go to a store twice (once for the rental once to return) every time I want to watch something. The day it is available I have it no waiting for it to come back etc.

The days of publishing as a useful business are gone. Books make sense because some people still like the feel of paper but for music and video there is no value added, actually negative value added since it is less convenient than downloading.

Some things need domain knowledge especially in programming but also at some level with mechanical engineering things. They can't do everything but a gear head that lives and dreams of cars might have better ideas of how to mount a suspension on a frame than a 4 year mech eng grad that has been taking the bus their whole life. An artist that is a competent coder might be more useful working on Maya than a computer ninja that doesn't understand the workflow of an artist. Similarly for medical software, accounting etc. Things that are themselves their own professions sometime need the coder that is a hack X but they also need the X that is a hack coder.

So you don't need to make or sell products.

But you slow down to a crawl if you are iding every customer, they might be using false ids or they've moved since the last time they got a license etc. Plus if you've ever saw a cops episode it seems everyone walks/drives around without any id (maybe that is just criminals some how thinking that if the cops can't figure out who they are they'll just let them go :)). The US is the only rich country I know of that still takes imprints (been to France, Germany, Czech, UK, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, and live in Canada). I've actually never had a imprint of my card because we've always had electronic readers and for the last 5 years or so chips in the card. I don't even know how many stores still have the ability I think it has been over a year since I even saw a imprint device.

I think it will end up being like when traveling to another country with a developed banking system for a long while: you'll pay for almost everything with credit cards or a head of time but you'll still have a couple hundred (equivalent) around just in case someone won't take it for whatever reason.

Ex. power blackouts like NY had last year, or ~15 years ago when New England and Ontario had a power outage for a couple days. Most things will shutdown anyways in those scenarios but still are businesses really not going to want to be able to sell things because their card reader isn't working? Or how about your wallet gets stolen, credit card gets hacked etc? With cash you might/likely have some around the house. How many people have a spare copy of their bank card and credit card and will it work once you report the other one as missing? What you are just going to not buy anything for 3-5 days while you wait for another one?