#comments

A bunch of news this week on Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) and how well they’re both doing with their latest gadgets. An analyst recently revised his estimates for Kindle sales and now believes that by 2010 the Kindle will represent a $1 billion dollar business for the company. No small beans. Also, Steve Jobs just dropped the bomb on the world that the App Store has already been responsible for 60 million downloads. Most of the free, but it still represents $30 million in sales ($20 million to developers!). He speculates that it will also become a $1 billion dollar business some time.

For both these companies I’ve read the skeptics come out and wonder why. For Amazon, people point at the Sony Reader and say why should the Kindle do better than it? Sony’s was a better device and it went nowhere. It must be marketing hype and overestimations of sales. More recently, for Apple, there’s wondering what all the hype is over the App Store, Tech Crunch notes that not one of them is a killer app. Which is absolutely true.

What I think these skeptics are missing is the fact that the stores themselves are the killer apps for these devices. The ease of getting new content or apps is what makes the devices so attractive. Prior to the Kindle and Whispernet, getting an E-book was an annoying process of buying on the web, shuffling files around the desktop and finally sync’ing to the device. With the Kindle, it’s an on-device over the air seamless purchase process. It’s easy and it just happens, wherever you are. Download the first bits of a book for free and purchase it right there if you like it and be reading the full book in moments. That is the difference. That’s not hype or marketing, that’s user friendly and a qualitatively different E-book experience.

The same thing goes for the App Store. It’s a one stop shop, whether on the desktop or your iPhone, you go to a single place and see everything that’s available. Purchasing couldn’t be easier. While the shop itself isn’t necessarily the experience it could be, it does a good job making getting apps really, really easy.

Palm was essentially granted a long life because of the apps it had. It could coast and do nothing for years because 3rd party developers could take up all the slack and provide a very long tail of apps for everything. But the process of finding those apps was a pain, you’d go to one of several app selling sites (or sometimes straight to the developer if you knew exactly what you wanted). After buying in whatever random process the vendor you chose for that particular app, you’d shuffle it around your desktop and then finally sync it to the palm. Hopefully you’d get an email from the vendor if an update became available.

With the App Store all these pain points are taken care of. One stop app shop and it is incredibly easy to a determine that there are updates available and to subsequently upgrade those apps. Incredibly easy, it has already happened several times for me since the App Store opened. This is why so many people are downloading apps, because why not? Sure at this point the store is pretty thin on apps – but that’s because it’s only just opened. It’s growing by something like 60 or so apps per day, which is far from shabby, and I suspect that’s mostly gated by Apple’s approval resources. Apps wait for many days for approval, so who knows how deep the waiting list is.

All that with a crappy store that prevents most apps from becoming viral hits. It is hard to work with the App Store, hard to publish what you’re using to your friends. All that could easily change and Apple could be selling ever more apps.

Anyhow, I’m just saying, it isn’t the content available that makes these things such a success, although obviously that plays a part. It’s the ease with which you have access to that content that makes it a success. People will buy when you make it easy and painless to buy. And that’s a lesson many companies could stand to learn.