iPhone Apps: Windows, Facebook or Flying Toasters
Will the iPhone platform help anyone make money? The underlying questions are 1) What is a platform? 2) Is the iPhone a platform or just a fun piece of hardware? Last year Facebook evolved from an application to a platform enabling a gold rush of investment in application vendors and new venture funds focused on monetizing the new platform. Presumably being a platform is better than being an application, as anybody old enough to remember the Flying Toaster screensaver can attest. After near-ubiquity in the PC era, Wes Boyd and better half Joan Blades (who would later go on to found MoveOn.org) in 1997 sold Berkeley Systems -- including its Flying Toaster application -- for a reported $13.7 million. In 2008 dollars, this would be a Series A. Applications were not a way to make money in the 1990s.
