robinv wrote:Pete Kaine wrote:
Why does he want Photoshop when Gimp can do everything that a consumer user would ever require in a simplified user front end and it's free?
Ummm because he's never heard of GIMP - where would he get that information?
My point exactly!
Why has he heard of Photoshop? Because Adobe has spent millions & millions over the last 20 years in promoting it and everyone accepts it as the defacto standard thanks to promtion and pushing of the product through various channels.
robinv wrote:
You assume far too much savvy in the average user.
I assume the same as you do. That he won't know about it unless he's told about it. That will be either through word of mouth or more likely via some company spending a wad load of cash to make him aware of it.
Although funnily enough my mum uses OpenOffice - but then she's a secretary and has been online longer than me (Compuserve - those were the days).
I recall using Openoffice when I was at school and it was still called Star Office and pretty much the going standard! If she's worked as a secretary for a good number of years I'm not supprised she's got a good grounding in it. I was always a bit suprised when it went open source.
But then they couldn't compete with the M.S. juggernaught of branding that is M.S. Office when it was paid for, or even now it's free!
robinv wrote:Pete Kaine wrote:
And a very large chunk of those sky high software fee's is what pays for it. If everything suddenly became worth £5 as an app then you'd have a generation of apps that are well known and everyone would buy them. But then without the funding they couldn't continue to expand the product line and maintain the marketing so either their popularity starts to wain or more disturbingly (and I fear more likely) they'll become dominant with all of the cash flow for that market sector going to them, and then they'll stagnate and other applications won't be able to surpass them in sales (no marketing) and it becomes bad for progression of the market itself.
But this is exactly what i'm trying to get across. Sell 5 copies at £1000 is the same as selling 500 copies at £10.
So say M.S. office or Adobe is now priced at £30 or you have Open Office or GIMP priced at £4.00.
They both do the same job, and acheive the same thing.
Which are people going to want?
I'd say the £30 one's because of perceived value due to past and current advertising. The £3.00 app's can't match this level of product pushing so they continue to not make money and the developers go out of business.
On the other hand the piracy of the £30 continues to take place, because "Hey, we're not paying money out to these rip off merchants..."
So all the small talented developers undersell themselves and go out of business because they can't compete with the giants and their big budget adverts. It then get's to the point where no one can compete with the established No.1 in the market place and they give up. Long term that firm sits on it's hands and then fails to increase development and it leads to the stagnetation of the market place as it then fails to develop.
For an example of this I'd say look at the history of IE6 and all the B.S. current web developers continue to deal with due to that dark period in the net's development.
What iApps have demonstrated is that many more people are prepared to pay small amounts of money for software (when it's done right as you say).
What it's proven is that Apples market share is mostly none techincal end users without the ability to jailbreak their phones...
Music is a good example here - music is now essentially worthless - it costs pennies but still people are reluctant to buy it.
That proves my point above and disproves your "smalls amounts" theory. We've reached a stage now where a lot of people (I hesitate to simply point the finger at the under 25 age bracket) take it as granted that you can get pretty much anything you want for free media wise if you know what your doing. Apple's done a great job at keeping it's phones locked down and preventing piracy, but other firms using a Microsoft/Google O.S. as it's desktop won't have the same Orwellian control over the code being run on it.
It's become so widespread and legitimate as free (spotify.com) that artists are having to find other ways of making money - gigs, special editions, HD, merchandising etc. Software will go the same way. Artists are still making money and making music - software houses will do the same if their model changes. I don't imagine my kids will ever have to pay hundreds of pounds for software - they may subscribe to something, pay for an entertaining game experience, but ultimately it'll probably be a £10 app for anything serious and then perhaps pay for some online training and support
Ahhh... I think our points just kind of merged
I agree. But then no one has currently worked out just what and how they are going to manage to do this.
The world of GOO guys sold their game through at under £7. They did this to encourage people to pay for what would otherwise have been a £20 game. It has been one of the biggest selling indie games of all time and yet they still estimate that 90% of players are on pirated versions.
Cost will not beat piracy. That genie is well out of the bottle.
So if an application has a market place of half a million users world wide and half of those pay a tenner (the other half pirate it) then the might be the market there to support one product being developed, but is the, the market there to support more than one?
If the isn't then I don't feel that this would be good for the market place due to the lack of inovation I fear would follow.
The other saviour here is the long touted cloud computing angle and it's the one that the guys with the real money are going after (Google/Microsoft/Sun)
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/microsoft-cloud/
In all honesty I don't buy into that either (and I've spent the best part of a decade following it) but it's the only model that would enable them to control software use via subscription 100%. Personally through I don't fancy having my software all stored and accessed remotely not for security reasons but for network capability reasons, although I'm sure business's will look at that in reverse.
I don't believe things will stay as they are in terms of the relationship between software, computers and perceived value - i think apps demonstrate that and IK demonstrate that by moving from small Italian music tech software house to (almost) house hold name with a £3.99 app and £20 interface for the iphone. All those months spent crafting the Miroslav Orchestra and all they needed to do was pretty up a jack plug - they will make tons of money.
I would love to see their sales figures and then see how much it contributes to the overall value vs development time over the years it took to get to that point.
I just went and looked for a stock listing for IK acturly to see if the was any end of year finances I could have checked but to no avail.
Put it this way though, if it was a public limited company I wouldn't add it to my portfolio...
Back to your point above about Miroslav Orchestra. What about the users who want to buy that software and not some £3.99 budget guitar rig. If IK tomorrow turned into a company that wrote nothing but guitar amp sims for the iphone because it made them a load of money, that would put more speclist products like Miroslav on the back burning or in the bin as it does take the time and money to develop. Do we really want that?
