The app store concept is not evil unless traditional distribution is eliminated.
Good point. They will be competing with their own vendors. How's that going to work? Will they be making promises to play nice?
Obviously, their vendors won't have any choice except to bend over, once again. And, obviously, this has all the makings of a total custer fluck - conflicts will be immediate and chronic. Microsoft will be setting up a web site that competes with their vendors, and they will necessarily be offering things that their vendors won't have available. I suppose they had to do something to try to counter Apple's success. Too bad they couldn't think of something original.
Innovation at its finest.
In the past, Microsoft has tried to 'innovate' by tying functionality between their OS and apps. Doing so helps prevent technology from escaping the Microsoft ecosystem and being deployed on competing operating systems, software, and hardware. Having an App Store that is supplied by independent programmers means that those programmers will be able to leverage their work across multiple platforms. This could have worked in Microsoft's favor if they had been early to the game. They could have positioned themselves in the center of a new, connected world and helped steer traffic by and through their world.
Instead, Microsoft has been doing the opposite; attempting to hold users captive to a separate ecosystem, thinking they could provide users with everything they could possibly want. Browsers, search, social networking, heck, even the internet itself happened despite Microsoft, not because of Microsoft.
And, no, corporate IT is not hopping on Microsoft bandwagons like they have in the past. Corporate migration away from XP has been slow, at best. Yes, there are suits who are happy to have Microsoft be the sole vendor of standard desktop apps. But truly interesting things are not done at Microsoft.
For an App Store to work, Microsoft would have to open up its desktop and maintain a backwards compatibility. They have a bad track record on that issue.
Truly, because Microsoft is so large, there will be money made, and truly, they can take some of the wind out of Apple's sails, but there is less to this than meets the eye.