Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Would you ever put a cart before a horse? Would the “cloud” market be thriving without the drastic explosion of mobile computing?
My point is does it really matter whether the chicken or the egg came first? You can’t have chickens without eggs and without chickens you can not produce eggs. They are a complete synergy. Naturally you would not put a cart before a horse because the horse is needed to pull the cart. They also are a complete synergy. Just like cloud and mobile are a perfect synergy. My prediction is that interest in “cloud” would not be nearly what it is today without mobile. After-all, hosted applications have been around a long time. What’s new is that people can afford mobile devices for personal use, bandwidth is more available and the overall experience is much better than a few short years ago.
Below are some interesting statistics about the mobile market. The article is about Microsoft Windows 8 Store specifically but has a lot of other good information. I have taken the liberty of summarizing the cliff notes below:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2012/07/is-microsoft-pricing-itself-out-of-its-own-app-market.php
- Windows 8 app minimum price will be $1.49 from the Windows 8 Store
- $1.49 to $999.99 range and incremented in 50-cent steps
- Microsoft keeps 30% of revenue, dropping to 20% after total app revenues reach $25,000
- Windows 8 Store will be Metro apps only, “desktop” apps will be sold outside of the Store framework by the individual developer
Interesting statistics on pricing models:
- 34% of the 1,473 developers polled used a per-download pricing model, pulling in an average of $2,451 per month across all mobile platforms
- Subscription pricing model averages $3,683 per month and only 12% of developers use this pricing model
- $3,033 using in-app purchases
Interesting statistics on revenues and development costs:
- Windows Phone app is $1,234 per month: $17,750 on average for development
- $3,700 per month for iOS: development $27,463
- $2,735 per month for Android: development $22,637
- $3,850 per month for BlackBerry: development $15,181
