After a While, You Stop Counting
By Harry McCracken | Monday, October 18, 2010 at 8:41 am
When McDonalds first got going, it was a small-but-pioneering outfit that was justifiably proud of how many hamburgers it had sold–so much so that it told the world on its famous signs. (Hey, a million burgers was a lot of burgers back then.)
It kept us all updated as the number grew and grew.
It cared so much it started meticulously updating signage all around the country–at considerable cost, I presume–to alert customers to the current count.
Eventually, the company got less obsessive about the whole thing. I mean, everyone already knew its customers had scarfed down a truly epic quantity of burgers, and while that was certainly worthy of celebration, nobody needed to know the precise number, right?
Today–at least on new signs–McDonalds doesn’t feel the need to inform the public that it’s sold an awful lot of ground-beef-on-a-bun over the past few decades. It’s pretty much self-evident, and just not that important.
So my question is this: When do Apple and Apple watchers stop caring so much about exactly how many iPhone apps there are?
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October 18th, 2010 at 9:16 am
Identifying the number of apps available implies a certain level of platform dominance and app eco system diversity. Its not a fair analogy to number of burgers sold. An analogy to burger sales would be closer to Apple identifying the number of apps downloaded.
October 18th, 2010 at 11:58 am
Maybe comparing Apps stores should be done the way you compare the GDP of whole countries. Somehow take into account whats actually being earned by Apps vs costs involved, the velocity of uptake, etc.
October 19th, 2010 at 8:56 pm
We had McDonalds in Jamaica I believe up late 2007, but it just could not keep up with our obsession for Burger King and KFC. What made it worst, McDonalds was situated next to KFC, (we have two KFC's in town). I personally loved their cheese burgers though over BK's, people always raved about their fries, never tasted the big deal. Loved their Sundae's, those were delicious, their Apple pies were lame, prefer KFC's and Burger Kings Apple pies. My mom said she preferred McDonalds fry chicken over KFC, she probably was the only one. Eventually, they shutdown and left Jamaica, which is too bad, BK ended up occupying where they were, so 2 KFC's, 2 BK's.
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