Kissing the App Store Goodbye

Before 1997 (more or less) companies built mighty marketing empires on print ads, radio ads, and TV ads. No direct way to track sales, except for coupons, which had a down-market vibe. No selling soap to people while at work -- people had to physically go to a store to buy. (People at work couldn't even see the ads for your soap, unless they were allowed to read the paper on the job.) Yeah, there were refunds and trials for many products, but they required driving back to the store to return something.

It was like the dark ages! And, yet, go to a grocery store, or even a toy store, and count the successful products that were launched back then.

My interpretation of the current iPhone developer malaise is that the gold rush is over. Many of the people making theatrical exits from the platform are its fair-weather friends -- they were bound to leave, in droves, once they discovered that it's no longer a matter of putting up your farting app on the Store and watching the money roll in. The reason 99% of iPhone app marketing is via the Store is that this strategy used to work, in the early days, so nobody bothered to learn any other strategy. Now, faced with the grim reality that marketing software is slow, patient work, a lot of people are getting right back out of the business again, or desperately lobbying Apple to somehow turn the magic spigot back on (as if their competitors will vanish once Apple fixes some of its problems). Or they're cutting their prices to the bone, starving themselves in the process, like a desperate gambler throwing everything into the pot.

I was just reading about the real California gold rush. In 1848 you could literally walk to the right place in the Sierras, turn over one rock, and find a gold nugget the size of your fist. By 1849 thousands of miners had arrived and had turned over every rock, there was no more easy money to be made, and a lot of aspiring miners were staggering around the landscape, hungry and poor. Of course, the majority of the gold was actually mined in later years, by mining companies using gigantic hoses that could turn entire mountains into dust and pass the dust through separators. But that required capital, and a relatively long-term plan. The pick-and-shovel miners often preferred to just look around for the next gold rush; a lot of them ran greedily to Alaska when gold was found there. Not such a great plan: The post-rush climate was a lot colder and harsher in Alaska.