150 THE RISK PREMIUM FACTOR Initially, we had no support from Blackberry; we even had to pay to be part of their developer program. They did not see how making the devices more useful could significantly expand their market, and since they could not generate revenue from our app, they never offered more than token marketing support in the form of brochures to hand out at trade shows. Part of Apple's genius in the app store was the understanding that free apps not only made the devices useful but also drove herds for traffic to their app store. MOBILE TODAY--THE NEED FOR APPS Apps were needed in the past and are needed today, but in five years, maybe not so much. In August, Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff wrote "The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet" for Wired magazine. They contend that a lot of what we do on the Internet is not on the Web but in apps, and that trend is expected to continue. However, they missed a key observation: the trend in mobile is largely just a replay of the trends in the early Web and pre-Web, where applications (once called software on PCs, now call apps on mobile) were built to over-