The Outsidr

Among the many shortcomings addressed by Apple’s second go at the mobile market this past July was the advent of an SDK and the opening of Apple’s App Store. As The Wall Street Journal reports this morning, it has been a successful endeavor as most likely presumed. $30 million in the first month of operation, or about $1 million of gross revenue per day.

There is nothing truly innovative about the App Store’s architecture; it is a repository system. The brilliance of the offering, as with all of Apple’s offerings, is the packaging and the marketing. It is so easy and appealing to spend money in the App Store it should be a crime. The real reason behind the App Store’s success is the plain and simple truth that people always want “more”. By giving customers an easy, hyped and attractive way to get more out of their iPhones, success was all but guaranteed.

So the App Store has proven itself to be a lucrative endeavor. This is not however, what the focus should be at the moment. Because of its initial desire to keep the iPhone platform closed, Apple essentially passed on a full year of significant revenue. Using the first month’s numbers, a year of $30 million per month sales works out to $360 million in gross revenue that Apple lost out on. The lesson: Apple loves to be secretive but as with most companies, it stands to benefit immensely by listening and responding to customers’ desires. Listen to customers; is the concept that complex? Had Apple foregone some of the initial secrecy and done some market research, it would have no doubt realized that people wanted third-party development. “Open” isn’t the tech buzzword of the decade by accident.