Yes, I’m the last person to tell you that the phrase of 2010 was “App Store”. Whether it’s Apple’s shops for iThingies and Macs, the Android Marketplace and its off-brand cousins, or even the quaint little App Catalog on my Pre, everyone is offering a single-stop shopping experience.

The most significant one, from a direction-of-the-market perspective, may be the Google Chrome Web Store. While nominally presented as a means to obtain addons and compatible sites for a specific browser, it strongly represents turning the open Web into the same app-store format. Although everyone sees it as the trend of 2010 and 2011, it’s really a trend of 1996. (more…)