If nothing else, businesses have to earn more revenue year after year because their costs go up due to inflation. Unless the business can simply charge ever-higher prices while keeping costs fixed, inflation will drive the business into bankruptcy.

If you still think it’s possible, any business that is just sitting there reaping profits will face more competition — why not steal the business from a lethargic business? It’s easy. That competition will drive them out of business by taking their customers.

As they say, a business that is not growing is dying. There’s no equilibrium point where a business can be idle and continue to reap profits. If you know of one, write an essay on it because you’re guaranteed to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Barney says “Hi”, the Great Gazoo says “Hi, Dum Dum”.

Some business ideas don’t scale and don’t need to. Not everyone wants to or can become the next “McDonalds”. I totally agree with Hillel. There’s no law (thankfully) that suggests that in order to be a successful business, you must have more customers than your competitors.

Say Hi to Barney for me.

The iPhone actually is very cool in this regard (though I haven’t broken down and gotten one yet), it’s designed from day one without the web app/client app dichotomy in terms of launching and windowing (though as walter points out the iPhone browser still has a separate favorites function that’s not integrated with the iPhone homepage). If you were designing a new desktop shell experience from the ground up (or heavily modifying an existing one) you would adopt some variation of the iPhone integrated launcher model. Thanks for pointing this out. I saw it but didn’t internalize that they’d made some progress in that direction.

One thing I’m sure we can agree on is that your snobbery and your ad hominem attacks on me are not profitable. I’ll let you get back to building the smallest business with the fewest customers. It’s an interesting approach, I’ll give you that.

That said, I believe you have a fundamental flaw in your thinking. You state at the end of your comment that the metric that “really matters” is which app people use more. This is broken thinking (imho). It’s the age old “market share is all that matters” philosophy. It’s true that market share is an important indicator, especially in markets where standards preclude the existence of a multitude of competitors, or infrastructure costs demand very high returns (and high scale).

But… (and this is an important but) not every product category fits those criteria. There are plenty of categories (including different types of software and web services) where having a small audience can be a profitable and economically rewarding enterprise. In fact, it’s the sheer scale of the internet that is turning the market share obsession on its head. The audience on the net is so great that if you can find a smaller group of folks who fervently love your product and build a loyal relationship with them that you can monetize effectively, then you have made yourself a nice business. Is it the biggest business? Maybe not. But it could be a very profitable one. Especially if your overhead is super low.

By your logic, my favorite restaurants in Seattle “suck more” because they have a tiny number of customers compared to McDonald’s. I guess you love your Big Macs. I mostly prefer my food made by a chefs who put care and attention to detail into every bite. (Though… I do love those McDonald’s fries every once-in-awhile .)

Problems are opportunities. Successful businesses love problems because they can build a business (make money, make people happy) on embracing them and obviating them. You sound like an idealist (and a lousy businessman) waiting for platform vendors to eliminate your opportunities to make better products than the competition. Idealists don’t build products people love (”suck less” in your words), pragmatic people build products people love.

So do your apps really suck less? On your subjective/idealist scale, your apps suck less. But what really matters, and what should matter to you as a software-maker and as a business, is the objective scale: what users think what sucks less and what sucks more. If people use your apps more than their competitors then you are correct that your apps suck less. But if your apps are used by fewer people than their competitors, then you have to admit that your apps suck more.

http://www.zeepe.com/zeepeinfo/mini-about.asp

12 years of gentle development, and these days pretty mature.

Obvious caveat: as always with these things, just one group (and our customers’) idea of what’s useful.