In mobile we have talked about “on deck” and “off deck” with the terms being all about carriers and whether or not a particular carrier was offering your content. The “new deck” is all about applications and app stores.
And contrary to what you might think, Apple’s iPhone app store isn’t the only new deck in town. Palm has announced a new application store and already has 5,000 offerings that work on more than two dozen devices including their Windows Mobile devices. Blackberry has an app store debuting in the spring and of course Google’s Android Market is already going gangbusters as well.
The proliferation of app stores impacats consumers, businesses and the mobile industry as a whole. For consumers it means that whatever your mobile device is, you can now do more with it. I predict that consumers will begin to shop for their next device based on the apps they can get and/or stick with a particular device for the apps they have already integrated into their daily life.
What the new deck means to businesses is that having an application store strategy is clearly necessary. Knowing which devices are most used by your target audience is a critical foundation step. And ignoring the application market will not work for long.
How do you think the “new deck” will impact our industry?
