Notes on Productivity Home Page

I don't understand why someone wants an app store. We don't need it anyway; we only need an easy to use, a beautifull, well organized, up-to-date and multi-lingual apps catalog.

Each products must be purchased on the editor web site.

My 2 cts!

Great post Eric. It always frustrates me when the topic comes up that we have people who see no value in the concept for them or their products/services so they assume it can have no value for anyone else. I think it could be a big help to transform the Notes application market by opening it up to new markets such as SMB. It may even help to attract that new breed of developer many of us are so anxious to see. Its great to see you are offering the community the benefit experiences. I hope somebody takes you up on your offer.

Eric, great idea!

You called me to discuss this but we did not connect. I would love to try this on the NotesAppStore site. A "live" environment will give us the chance to work out the implementation details across different product types. This idea moves us closer to a "true" App Store.

My goal for the NotesAppStore is to implement those things that makes it easier for a buyer to try (and buy) a Lotus Notes product.

@Oliver, I didn't fully understand it either (though, in theory, I liked the idea) until I started using an iPad. The iPad homepage looks almost identical to the Notes Workspace - square icons that you can organize into separate screens; the only noticeable difference is that you swipe to change screens instead of clicking a tab - and one of those icons opens an App Store that lets me browse/search the entire catalog. If I see something I want, I click one button to download it; it prompts me for my iTunes password, then starts installing. In a few seconds, the app is ready to use... none of this Next, Next, Next, Yes, Next, No, Next, Finish nonsense.

It seems most people that don't see the value in an app store for Notes are thinking about apps on the scale of ideaJam, where the product costs thousands of dollars, needs to be implemented by an admin to be of any real value, and would be purchased via PO more often than by credit card. But having used the iPad for just a couple months, I'm thinking the real value of a Notes app store would be the emergence (or re-emergence) of a bunch of apps on the scale of a basic personal task manager, or something like TwitNotes or Wildfire, which are not about sharing internal data with internal users, but rather about integrating the Notes client with various cloud-based applications and services.

Imagine if each of these types of apps cost $5 (which seems to be higher than the average cost of an iOS app): there are supposedly over 100 million active Lotus Notes users. For every 1% of those who chose to purchase a Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn / Plaxo connector for Notes, whoever wrote it makes $5 million dollars (minus whatever commission is extracted by whoever runs the app store). That's the kind of "get-rich-quick" possibility that is inspiring all manner of developers to write iOS apps... and (I suspect) would inspire the same type of opportunists to try Notes development when they realize the target market is even larger than that of iOS device owners.