Apple and its partners were completely surprised by the huge success of the App Store - with the implication that others in the smartphone biz were similarly unprepared for the level of pent-up demand for customizable features on handheld devices.
“We had no idea there would be 2bn downloads by October,” Kleiner Perkins partner Matt Murphy, manager of the then $100m fund, told the Financial Times. “Most people within Apple, if you had told them it would be a fifth of that by now, they would have been pretty happy.”
The FT report looks at the success of the App Store, and compares the introduction of the service with that of the iPhone, noting Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ slightly muted announcement of the store as a “pretty cool” way to get a
