That's how Game consoles operated, so there was definitely precedent.

But it took until 93-94 for Windows to actually become dominant enough to have such leverage, some argue that this only really happened with Windows 95. Since it was an open ecosystem for almost a decade at that point, changing was hard.

The Apple AppStore was different, it was launched after the iPhone shipped 13 million units and "only allowed web apps".

Downloading software over dial-up speeds of 14.4 kbps to 28.8 kbps sucked, and most businesses weren't large enterprises so didn't have T1s (which were themselves only 1.5 Mbps) so sending the office manager across town to Circuit City to buy a boxed copy of some piece of software made sense. The app stores of the 90s were "third party" and physical and covered the needs and capabilities of 90s companies. The other "app store" was even more indirect, software makers paying PC sellers to pre-install.

It could be argued that it was part of "embrace, extend, extinguish" to attract developers to the platform by keeping it open. They would just figure out how to capitalize on anything that got big enough, much like Google.

Apple really pioneered the walled garden (which I would assume was previously taken to be shooting yourself in the foot), and it's proven to resonate with the wider less tech-savvy population.

> And you don't need the internet to sell applications.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? I don't know how you'd sell them otherwise. How do you do you process a payment without a network connection? The only thing I can think of is offering a catalog in the OS which users could browse and physically order stuff from, but I wouldn't call that a store.

Moving megabytes and then gigabytes were really expensive and error prone. physical media was faster and practically no error.