Vanity Programming
Brick-and-mortar retail stores, when they work well, aren't just big buildings full of products that sit on shelves until the customer walks in the door. Retailers rely on countless marketing opportunities to bring in sales, from window displays to end-of-aisle placement to up-selling at the cash register. They advertise in newspapers and on television, and those ads often mention specific products. Apple offers some of these opportunities, but not nearly enough.
Even worse, the "trade dress" of every application on the iTunes App Store is virtually identical. Every application is given the same amount of space online -- the same-sized icon, the same-sized preview images, the same box in which to display a description of the app. Where are the branding opportunities? How can one vendor differentiate itself from all of the others?
To understand what I'm talking about, imagine two clear glass bottles. One contains vodka, and the other contains "premium," "top shelf" vodka. The products are nearly identical, the manufacturing costs are essentially the same, but the second bottle costs twice as much as the first. That's branding. And by the way, if you think this doesn't work in the world of IT, just remember: Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. On the iTunes App Store, Apple is the premium brand; software developers are virtually invisible.
Software vendors need to be aware of these distinctions before they fully invest in an App Store-style sales model.
To my mind, this model of software distribution so far resembles less the late, lamented local bookstore than it does the age-old business of vanity publishing. Unlike proper publishers, vanity presses handle printing and distribution for a fee, then you set a retail price for your product, you handle all the marketing, and you get to pocket the profits -- what profits there are. Note how few authors ever got rich publishing through a vanity press.
If the satisfaction of bringing a product to market is enough for you, fine. I suspect most developers want more than that.
Will this situation change? Will online distribution mature? Only if it's in the distributors' interests for it to do so. Good thing online distribution isn't our only option -- yet.
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