Thank you Steve Jobs and Apple for your closed cultlike controlled system.

If Apple does succeed in owning the term 'app', well, good for them. They earned it. Pre iPhone, you did not use apps, did not know of this word. Apps did not exist. Pre iPhone, Android was designed to look (and act) like a Blackberry. Before iPhone, Google sneered at "closed" "not-web" applications. Pre iPhone, Microsoft could not even envision a world where *billions* of users would get their software from the cloud -- or Apple -- for next to nothing. And be very very happy.

Pre iPhone, there were guys who gave away software, or hoped to collect a bit of money for their efforts. Otherwise, it was packaged, costly and restrictive.

Pre iPhone, tablets were just something Steve Ballmer talked about once a year.

But we are no longer living pre-iPhone. And one of the many wealth-generating, creativity-inspiring innovations of "closed" Apple, is the humble app. And as I have told you before:

• the smartphone is the computer
• the app is the primary means of accessing the full functionality and capability of the smartphone

Forrester takes a look at the humble app, and sees amazing potential:

There are over 350,000 applications available for download on the iOS platform, and after the success of that app platform, downloadable applications spread to almost every other mobile platform too.

But a report released Monday by Forrester Research, the market research company, said the business opportunities associated with apps were just beginning. Forrester estimates that the revenue created from customers buying and downloading apps to smartphones and tablets will reach $38 billion by 2015. 

The report, written by John C. McCarthy, an analyst at Forrester, also predicts that the enterprise business opportunities for apps will grow vastly over the next four years. In Mr. McCarthy’s view, corporations will spend up to $17 billion creating apps for their products and working with third-party services and companies that manage these apps. There will also be corporations that will build private applications meant for internal purposes, he says.

Mr. McCarthy estimates that the combined revenues from mobile applications, services and business management will reach $54.6 billion a year by 2015.