Interview with Steve Jobs in the Wall Street Journal
Sales of apps for the iPhone at $1m a day produced $21m for developers.
“If sales stay at the current pace, Apple stands to reap at least $360 million a year in new revenue from the App Store, Mr. Jobs said. “This thing’s going to crest a half a billion, soon,” he added. “Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my career for software,” he said.
Apple isn’t likely to derive much in the way of direct profit from the business, Mr. Jobs acknowledged. It is keeping only 30% of the proceeds from application sales — about enough to cover expenses from credit-card transactions and other costs of running the online store — while the programs’ creators keep 70%.
Instead, Mr. Jobs is betting applications will sell more iPhones and wireless-enabled iPod touch devices, enhancing the appeal of the products in the same way music sold through Apple’s iTunes has made iPods more desirable.”
“Phone differentiation used to be about radios and antennas and things like that,” Mr. Jobs said. “We think, going forward, the phone of the future will be differentiated by software.”
A note about moderated comments. Some of the comments we get are from companies promoting software. If it is relevant to the subject area I leave them. When irrelevant, I delete them.
Unfortunately, these posts still show up in the RSS feed for comments.
At present it is just an irritation. If it becomes more of a problem we may need a more restrictive policy on posting.