Cadence just announced that it’s adding a web portal facility to its OrCAD Capture tool, and they’re enabling two different capabilities with this. The first is obvious: allowing easier access to relevant information from the OrCAD ecosystem.

But more interesting is the ability to buy apps. Now… presumably this is different from phone apps stores, where the strength – hundreds of thousands of apps – is also the weakness (why having to choose between 100 different random indistinguishable variants of the same function is a good thing is unclear to me).

In fact, I asked them what apps are available: there actually aren’t any yet, although there are some in the pipe, ranging from general productivity apps to data management to custom reports. So at least they’re vetting the apps.

Now… are they vetting them so that their app store will be better than the Android store? Or because they want ultimate control and universal imperial dominance like Apple? Specifically, it brought to mind earlier comments by CMO Bruggeman about the attractiveness of being a toll-taker, a theme upon which I riffed further. So is this the start of an attempt by Cadence to dabble in toll-taking? Will Cadence get a cut of the apps revenue?

Their response is, “Not at this time.”

More detail in their release…