I remember when ‘applications’ cost $40+ and were therefore something you’d spend many hours using or playing. As a student I couldn’t afford too many of them, but unit sales were in the millions.
Wikipedia:
Biodiversity is often used as a measure of the health of biological systems.
If you went out on a limb and called the iTunes App Store an ecosystem, its exploding growth and variety in all directions would qualify it as a rain forest. This point was brought home when my buddy Dave shot me this link. I share it not as an example of programming virtuosity or because everyone will want it, but because it’s the sort of ultra-specialization that occurs on the margins of an ecosystem when it is entrenched and supportive of even the ultra-niche.
This variety itself might be the ultimate killer app, the meta-attraction, the seductive sum that encourages adoption of the parts, with first-year downloads of over a billion units.
