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Much has been made of the enormous sales iTunes App Store has garnered in the first few weeks after its launch. Steve Jobs was recently quoted as saying it may generate Apple a half a billion dollars in revenue year, perhaps even a billion.

Which begs the question: why hasn’t this been done before? It should be possible – nay, easy – to tie software distribution to an OS license key (that god-awful 20-character string you have to manually type in during a Windows install) which would provide the same level of minimal “FairPlay” security you get with an iTunes song or a signed (legally distributed) iTunes App Store application.

And certainly there is a huge market for applications that cost between 99 cents and $9.99 which perform useful things.

How is it that Microsoft hasn’t married those two ideas together? Even with piracy, if you make things cheap enough and easy enough to get to, people will pay for them. iTunes is proof of that, and the iTunes App Store is further proof.

So, will I be buying my MS Office OSX components at $59.99 a pop this time next year through some version of Live Mesh? I rather think so, because Microsoft takes 100% of that sale. Which means they’ll likely earn more on that sale – at a lower price – than they would through the channel. And yes, another $59.99 for PowerPoint, another for Access, another for Excel. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Expect it. Soon.