This all feels really familiar. The PC application market used to have the same "get rich quick" carnival vibe, as did dot-coms. Eventually the craziness will

This all feels really familiar. The PC application market used to have the same "get rich quick" carnival vibe, as did dot-coms. Eventually the craziness will die down, and only the more serious developers will stick around. There's bound to be some big consolidation. It's inevitable as the market matures, and we've seen this pattern over and over and over and over. The real question though, is whether the pricing model and consumer expectations have been so degraded that the situation is unredeemable. At 70 cents per sale, the revenue isn't enough to support many players. At current prices, the TAM of iPhone apps looks like around a billion dollars, with Apple skimming around 300 million right off the top. So, that leaves us with around $700 million in revenue per year. That's enough to support a handful of small-to-midsize development shops, with nobody capturing more than a few million a year. However, the money certainly isn't enough to support multiple large software businesses. Adobe alone did $700 million in sales last quarter. I don't think that this is a healthy state of affairs. Hopefully, things will improve after the shakeout.