Who’s managing the App Stores?
2010-02-11
For an industry whose concept of service used to mean renting a piece of copper to someone by the mile or the minute, the idea of selling applications on top of bandwidth has obvious attractions. And as Alun Lewis writes, given that raw connectivity becomes a cheaper commodity by the day, diversifying into stickier, value-added offerings makes excellent commercial sense – assuming, of course, that this new revenue chain in all its glorious, multi-dimensional complexity can be supported efficiently.
With non-telco companies like Apple setting the pace with a claimed download total of two billion applications a year after launch - and Nokia’s Ovi store about to undergo a revamp after a slightly disappointing daily performance of only one million downloads a day – things are certainly hotting up.
Since the emergence of Service Delivery Platforms at the start of the decade, a great deal of effort has gone into working out the best ways of controlling the plumbing involved in the delivery of advanced services, content and applications. Only comparatively recently though has attention turned to the problems of managing the extreme complexity that inevitably accompanies an online retail environment composed of many thousands – or even millions – of different offerings.
