Apple Doomed, According to News at 11
If I had to speculate, I’d say that Apple’s amazing success over the past five or six years has effectively blinded the company to these problems, or, to be more charitable, that the success has resulted in Apple prioritizing software quality behind hardware quality and predetermined ship dates, and in sticking with a set of App Store policies that no company in a less dominant position could ram down developers’ throats.
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Once more: success hides problems.
Not being able to upgrade App Store apps is not evidence of yet another "new economy", it just means that it's yet another place where Apple's model does not meet reality. If they want another dollar out of me for, say, iPhoto or Keynote ever again, they have to either fix this or release new separate versions. It's very telling that Lion and Mountain Lion have both been separate entries, and despite Apple's new software being out in App Store form, they have yet to ship a true major version upgrade of an app. Apple has a number of other profitable businesses and a single Profit & Loss, but it's still not sustainable even for them to only charge once for an app during its entire lifetime.
Ten bucks says paid upgrades in OS X 10.9 Ceiling Cat. A hundred bucks says big changes to the App Store or its model in the next year (excluding the kind of storefront redesign we saw last year).
@Jesper Apparently I haven’t linked to Ed Catmull talking about success hiding problems yet.
