My gut reaction when I saw the iPhone numbers today was disbelief, then I couldn’t help laughing. According to Apple, since July 11th, they’ve sold a million phones and ten million applications. In three days. I wonder if McDonalds could sell ten million hamburgers in a weekend. Let’s see how laughable this is:

• Just last year, Compass Intelligence estimated the entirety of the US mobile application market to be $3.8 billion dollars. Recent reports estimate an easy $1 billion dollars onto Apple’s top line in twelve months in application software sales alone, establishing itself (in the first year) as a quarter of the market. I don’t know who manages mobile applications at Microsoft… but they really ought to fire him, don’t you think?
• Just open the App store on your iPod and look at what you have… comments from users. Yes, users who actually care about the application and took the time to give some feedback about it. Thousands of them. Name another mobile application ANYWHERE where the general public is commenting on it, providing feedback on it, and paying for it.
• Take a look at some of the companies and people who wrote those applications. Do you see names you don’t recognize? Do you see names that must belong to a company over a garage, or to a company safe and sound in Minsk? I do, and it makes me think of a local company that raised seven figures to write a mobile app. Ooops.
• The last mMetric report I saw (which was a while ago, I admit) had something like 20 or so value added services on it’s spreadsheet. Ummmm…. what’s the app count now? 800? It was 800 this morning, probably something like 820 by the time I go to bed.

Here’s my image, and it’s from 1986. It’s of Larry Bird coming down the court, in the fourth quarter, setting himself up for yet another three pointer. Everybody knows he’s going to sink it, and everybody knows he can’t be stopped. Yes, everyone on the court is wearing the same sort of uniform, shooting the same ball with the same rules, but nobody is doing what Larry is doing. He’s risen to an entirely different level. In the Garden, even His Airness Michael Jordan couldn’t stop him. For now, just like the opposing team, all you can do is watch and wonder.