Apple has damaged the perceived value of software
mattgemmell.com
mattgemmell.com
The problem is not selling software (or songs, or movies or any other IP really) for too little, the problem is billing for something that is not scarce. People intuitively understand that scarce things have value and that the value depends on how scarce it is. This is why selling things for which there is an unlimited supply is an uphill battle.
Look at it like this: if you hire a plumber to install a toilet in your home, would you accept it if the toilet was 'free' but you had to pay a fee for every usage ? Hell no. But you'll gladly pay the plumbers hourly wage and material costs.
The IP industry is trying to sell toilets on a pay-per-flush basis and then acts all surprised when people don't accept this and see no ethical problems with piracy.
The real solution would be to find a way to charge for things that people do consider scarce, such as the developers/artists time. Unless we find a way to do that we are stuck with this conflict between consumers and producers of IP.
Who expects medicine to be free because they cost nothing to replicate?
There is a large group pushing for Health Care to be free. This includes medicine.
Germany has arguably the best, but certainly the free-est (in the sense that you are free to choose which doctor to see and what kind of treatment to receive), universal healthcare system. The premiums of almost 40% of the adult population are very close to 0. They don't pay for that. Other folks do.
Enjoy those people voting for more free shit.
People were seeing doctors who were over-prescribing opiates, making them cheap and readily available. The DEA (federal Drug Enforcement Administration) cracked down and suddenly these highly addictive prescription opiates were severely constrained, which increased demand for cheap heroin.
Now heroin has replaced prescriptions as the cheap and readily available opiate.
Doctors, in general, are doctors because they wanted to be doctors. Some of them may be in it for the money, but if you are really in it for the money, you become a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, not a primary care physician in Buttfuck, Idaho - where all the rural heroin epidemic victims are.
Sure, some countries hand out opioids more freely than others, but in spain, Codeine is prescription free. Walk into a pharmacy, say you want codeine, you get codeine. I don't see an opioid epidemic in spain. If ease of access was the driving factor behind opioid abuse, spain should be all about opioid abuse. Codeine may not be the most potent opioid in the universe, but it is what it is.
I think its the surgery thing. Because if you fuck up your spine and are in perpetual pain and also cant work anymore which just makes the problem worse because then you cant even afford the morphine, maybe taking the morphine isnt such a bad idea.
You're not seeing it in Europe because you don't have a gigantic portion of your population that's unemployed like we do. (Our official unemployment numbers are complete lies.)
Assuming that people kinda decide to just do drugs because despair is a bit ridiculous. Theres always a reason to do drugs. Almost noone was born an addict, and if you reason that those addictions originated at doctors appointments (prescribed medicine), it was probably not some kind of recreational turned addict thing.
Or are you trying to argue that its the national sport of rural folks to go to their local doctor and check the opioid menu for the flavour of the month opioid to shoot up their vein because they're out of a job and feel despair about it? That sounds a bit far-fetched.
The one thing I do have a problem with is that europe has managed to engineer its population into a situation in which the majority of folks are forced into positions where they can't move out of welfare even if they wanted to, in a reasonable fashion.
In my opinion, both healthcare and internet access have achieved utility status.
This sentence has a ton of negative connotations, so yes you did allude that it may be a bad thing. Sorry, had to call you out.
What makes it a fundamental human right? The fact that it says so in the constitution of some countries doesn't make it a fundamental human right.
Is it a fundamental human right like the fact that you can think whatever you want? Because thats a god given ability that nobody can take away. Healthcare is just a modern luxury. You might call it necessary, but healthcare didnt really exist even 60 years ago. People died of really silly little things just 60 years ago. What makes it fundamental?
Yeah, the world sucks in many ways. Good thing we haven't lost our will to fight that.
>Healthcare is just a modern luxury.
Oh your kid was born with cancer and you're poor? Tough luck, no "luxurious" healthcare for you!
>You might call it necessary, but healthcare didnt really exist even 60 years ago. People died of really silly little things just 60 years ago.
And 60 years from now, even fewer people are going to die from really silly little things. What isn't a right now, might become a right in the future. We would call that called progress.
>What makes it fundamental?
Because our evolved brains can contemplate the morality of our actions. A world where health care is a fundamental right is _MORE MORAL_ than a world without.
Rights, laws, rules, the constitution, etc are all abstract ideas that we created to serve us. We get to change them at any point to make them more in line with modern expectations.
No one is saying you need a free ride here, they're saying if you pay your taxes, you should have access the same as for education, or water, or public roads.
>exactly how much healthcare access is a right.
Its not that hard to make a distinction between cancer and catching a cold. Pretty much all laws take into account intent, credibility, reasonable justification and other vague ill-defined criteria.
>what if the required resources are not available in the same amount any more?
Based on available funds, the codified law would be either stricter or looser on the qualifying criteria.
>Are people's rights now violated,
Yes, they would be.
>and if so, by whom?
You should be able to sue the party given the task of dispensing healthcare and make your argument.
One can look at health care type spending as a cost, or an investment.
The cost argument generally boils down to "voting in free shit." From the point of view of those able to pay, it is free to those who aren't. From the point of view of those not paying, they see others getting wealthy, and able to get wealthy for their efforts and a productive, capable society.
The investment view boils down to demand, which also presents two ways:
One way is demand not backed by liquid dollars. People want and need stuff, but cannot participate in the markets for lack of buying power.
The other way is demand backed by liquid dollars, real, effective buying power.
The more of the non participating demand there is, and the more it goes unmet, that society experiences generally lower standard of living, instability, higher crime, etc.
We want real demand, people able to participate in the markets.
Investments in the people do that, which frees dollars for them to spend, and it improves their capability, improving on their ability to produce.
You may ask how an economy grows.
When people take risks and borrow, banks make new money as the risk is valued. The investments in people help to improve real demand, which lowers risk, increases success. Each success increases the money supply, and that increase is backed by the value created when the risk was taken.
In a very real sense, "free shit" is actually a smart investment everyone does benefit from, even those paying.
Forcing someone to pay for someone elses expenses is application of force. "For the greater good" is immoral. Read Harry Potter :D
The full, maxed-out tax burden of living in germany approaches 70%. Thats too much. It is immoral, and applies to people who make more than roughly 65k a year. Not a lot of money. And they get to keep 1/3rd of it.
People really really don't want to hear that, but the remote freelance economy is coming. Its just software engineers now. Maybe itll be mechanical engineers next. Finance people, really have no reason to be in offices either. Countries will lose the ability to trap us in their tax exploitation schemes and we will leave. I already do. Renegotiate or lose your productive work force.
People think germany cant fail. Germany is oh so great with its amazing education system. Volkswagen can't shit out more than 20 electric cars by 2020. It takes approximately one Elon to shit all over everything the German tech sector has achieved in 20 years.
Starting a company here? Absolutely not going to happen. Germany is a great place when you're poor.
I got approached by a recruiter the other week. I have 11 years of experience across a whole bunch of stuff. I make 200k+ a year contracting, for american companies who value their engineers. This recruiting lady calls me up, wants to recruit me. I play along just for fun. Tell her roughly what I'd consider. Goes back and forth. 3 calls. Comes back with a "salary matrix". Salary matrix says 11 years of experience gets lumped together with 6 years of experience and pays out 46k a year. Please.
Germany has a better standard of living? Completely agree. 100%. If you take a look at the entire population, I agree. But to me, personally, there are a lot of places that would love to have me, and shower me in tax rebates and decades of tax free living. They compete for me. And they are winning this fucking war. And I dont know what Germanyi s going to become once its alienated all its engineers.
What do all the blue collar folks do when the engineers are gone? I'm not sure. I'm not into politics. I really can't tell you. Only thing I can tell you is that they've lost me. And I really liked it here. But fucking me out of 70% of my money and then being told that I should be grateful for it has lost me. At least show some respect. Even if its for the greater good. You can still appreciate the people who make the greater good possible.
And yes, it is 70%. I have done the math. Income tax, social security that I will never benefit from, VAT on top of that and a myriad of smallish taxes and fees and shit amount to roughly that.
I understand that theres free education. And I benefitted from that. Sure. But if you assume that I'm going to pay ridiculous amounts of money for 50 years, by choice, just because I was born into a system that is the way it is, sorry, thats not going to happen. If you want to hold that I against me, I'm going to hold against the system that I was forced into military service, which is essentially slavery, and if anyone ever decides to drop a bomb onto germany, I'm expected to act as cannon fodder for the "military".
In fact, if we simply didn't change them and reprioritized our existing budget, it would begin to work nicely in the US.
As for fact, economics is not a hard science. Agreed.
Our own history is all we need to know here. Regular and consistent investment spending has a solid basis in history. It's as solid as many other ideas are.
We are left with value judgements. Frankly, I value a bit more basic security and stability more than I do a greater share of dollars earned. I am joined by a growing majority of Americans in these things too.
I don't care what you do. Seriously.
Here, cost and risk exposure is very high. While you may not like the amount your society costs, I can say the lack of sane health care policy, for one, here is something I dislike just as much.
I have just as much and just as valid cause for my advocacy as you do.
Did it all right, but someone got sick. I had two choices:
Let them die, or experience financial ruin. That is no fucking joke. A state of affairs faced by millions all the time here.
And I got forced there too. Let's just say others, who felt they needed more threw me under the bus. Other details do not need to be here.
Perspective, huh?
:D
Cheers! May we both somehow arrive at a more equitable place.
What I meant to say is that Keynesian economics is not the only form of economics out there. Even lots of economics folks blatantly deny that fact.
What a load of self-serving, B.S. Public tax-payer funded health care is not some form of slavery for everyone who pays their taxes and doesn't get sick. And considering the author of Harry Potter benefited greatly from both health care services and other public benefits while writing her books, I think you don't have a leg to stand on there.
More to the point, you don't like the system, you're free to leave Germany, or whatever other country. But if you want to stay, you gotta pay your taxes. It's not "immoral" it's just your decision. The big difference between Germany now, and East Germany of 40 years ago, is you actually can leave anytime you want.
Making another 100mg of a medicine may cost essentially zero on a pharmaceutical plant, but you can sell the access to the plant.
Copying data is not just easy, but you have already bought the "factory equipment" needed for it, that is, a computer. Thus the drive to dumb down consumer computers (DRM) or move the essential things from users' possession so that they could not easily copy them (SaaS).
The true cost of bringing a drug to market - inclusive of the extensive research and development required, the failed candidates, the FDA testing and approval processes, etc. - is around $2,800,000,000.
And so, as the saying goes, the first pill costs $2.8B, the second pill costs $0.01. "People" only consider the $0.01 cost to produce the pills that they desire to take, and seem to easily ignore that initial $2.8B investment. This is why patent protection is so critical to the success of many industries, especially medical devices and pharmaceuticals.
This also explains why drug companies refuse to develop life-saving drugs if the potential market for the drug is too small. In many cases, they would have to charge $1,000,000+ per treatment to break even. There are several medications on the market which, for the full course of treatment, cost around $300,000. This seems to be the upper limit in drug development, and insurance is willing to pay the price because one successful treatment will likely save them 10x that amount in the elimination of future care.
This is a recent (3/2/2017) article [1] on one such $300,000/year enzyme-based treatment for a rare disease which affects an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 people worldwide! Development of drugs for rare diseases has been a major problem for quite a while, with legislation on the matter dating back to 1983. However, it's apparent that it's still a problem.
And here is another article on yet another $300,000 treatment (see, there's that number again) to treat cystic fibrosis.
[1]: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/02/pompe-drug-lauded-by-trump-co...
[2]: https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2016/09/19/sarepta-duchen...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_drug_development#Resea...
While it does makes sense that pharma r&d is expensive ,It's really hard to believe those numbers, specially that they always seem to change: first it was ~$700M/drug, than ~1.5B and now 2.8B ?
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2012/02/10/the-tr...
The point is that it would be easier for people to digest the costs if they paid for development, not for the cost of producing the pills.
Let's say it costs $1B to produce a certain new type of medication. The company who developed it expects to sell about 100 million pills a year. The pills cost $0.01 to produce.
Sell the pills for $0.02 and for the first 10 years add a $20/pill 'development cost recuperation' charge, list it on the bill as such. The company gets a 200% R.O.I. on initial development, plus a 200% R.O.I on every pill sold.
Few people have problems with a company recovering their costs and making a decent profit. The problems start when the costs have been made back ten times over and they are still keeping the price high using the initial development costs as an excuse.
What I'm trying to say is that companies should adjust their business model to align with how people perceive the world, instead of trying to rewrite millions of years of evolution to fit their business model.
Why are services like Netflix and Spotify so popular ? Not because people suddenly changed their mind about paying for IP. Netflix and Spotify sell a service, and people accept that services cost money.
I'm sure many people would expect that, if they were perform the replication themselves using thier own equipment, as they do for software and media.
The cost of copying is not related to value.
But you'll gladly pay the plumbers hourly wage and material costs.
Most people, quite sensibly, don't want to pay a programmer's or airplane engineer's hourly wage.
Then what is ?
And the initial price you pay can't merely cover the cost of research, testing, development, production, supply chain profits, transportation, and meager profits for the business, but it has to extend to maintenance, updates, warranty coverage, returns, replacements, etc. Maintaining software is a continual battle, especially if the software is going to be implemented in an extremely segmented market (Android and the thousands of versions in the wild, personal computers with thousands of makes and models of graphics cards, drivers, chipsets, libraries, etc.).
Developing and testing software updates, which are expected weekly and free of charge, isn't only an Apple thing. And they weren't the first to start it.
once created the value of a copy is pretty much zero
It's not the value that approaches zero, it's the Marginal Cost of producing one more unit. It doesn't cost anything to reproduce it, but if people will pay higher, then there is value. When you have an economic moat (less competition) or a monopoly, you can capture some of this value. (Think Telsa selling software upgrades to improve car performance - zero Marginal Cost, but high value) In Perfect Competition, prices approach or hit the Marginal Cost.
Other than that nitpicking, I agree with the rest of what you say. :-)
It's important to note that this is a particular kind of value, a neo-classical definition. The Marxian one is independent of what people will pay for an item; for example, land, honor, titles of nobility etc. Have no value.
Luckily, philosophers do not believe in the fact that their different ideas actually compete with each other.
Besides this, Russia is a capitalist country. My apologies if you weren't stating that it wasn't.
I don't want to live in a country that is run exclusively by peasants. That happened, successfully, in russia. In the 1920s. And the result was not pretty.
Sure, russia is "capitalist" now. Capitalist means absolutely nothing in terms of philosophy. Its just a word used by marxists to express their annoyance with a vague concept that results in the creation of value (and they obviously have no problem with value, but the returns should absolutely, entirely, end up in the hands of the peasants, not some hokey dokey CEO. That aside, russia was not "capitalist" for a long time, and still suffers the consequences.
Specifically in the case of Russia, they have another big problem - which is the idea that they are still somehow the core of the USSR and have to restore that thing, instead of trying to fix their real issues.
People seem to forget that there are janitors at microsoft who drive ferraris. They took stock options over vacation time.
No, it didn't. The Leninist vanguard were not all (or even largely, especially at the highest ranks) peasants.
Even in feudal economies, peasants had individual or collective property interests in land (serfs and slaves might not, but those are different than peasants, and serfdom had been abolished in Russia generations before the Revolution.) Russian peasants at the time of the Revolution generally were individual landholders because of the recent breakup of collective ownership (other places similar reforms were implemented eventually led to most former peasants ending up as wage laborers as large capital interests bought up agrarian land, but that hadn't had time to happen yet in Russia, and the de-collectivization was still popular among peasants, which is probably a big factor in why peasants in Russia were seen as class enemies of the proletariat by the Bolsheviks; they were, if only tenuously and transitionally, essentially situated like members of the petit bourgeoisie.)
While true it was too little and too late, the conditions of russian peasants at that time were still very serf-like. That and WWI defeat sparked the russian revolution, along with certain interest in the West to destabilize Russia.
The Leninist vanguard generally was not peasants, whether or not they were true Communists.
This is patently (excuse the pun) false. One of the largest economic texts it Capital by Karl Marx; in this book his only objective is to critique classical political economy, and by doing so set out what constitutes capitalism. It's not vague, Marx defines capitalism in very concrete terms. Her refers to the capitalist mode of production, which consists of production to maximise exchange value of commodities, the private ownership of social means of production, and the primacy of wage labour.
>and they obviously have no problem with value
This is false. Communists do have a problem with value, their qualm is with exchange value ruling production, which is almost a unique quality of capitalism. It results in shoddy goods, goods not made to be used, but to be exchanged in a money-commodity circuit.
>end up in the hands of the peasants
Not even Communists argue for this; the Communists argue for the means of production to be put into the hands of the people, who can, within themselves, elect leaders who are qualified for the task. This is democratic rule, rather than autocratic rule (which is what there is now) of a particular firm's productive capacity within an industry.
>russia was not "capitalist" for a long time, and still suffers the consequences.
You're right, it had the feudalist mode of production for that time. With the advent of the USSR, it had the state-capitalist mode of production. On what basis do I declare this? On the basis of Marx's definition of the capitalist mode of production.
>which is the idea that they are still somehow the core of the USSR and have to restore that thing, instead of trying to fix their real issues.
What issues are you talking about, in particular? I think the requirement to sell one's labour to a class of property owners is a rather big issue.
>People seem to forget that there are janitors at microsoft who drive ferraris.
That doesn't mean that they are not exploited; janitors driving Ferraris has nothing to do with the problems of capitalism.
I consider Marx a clown, and marxism is a clown fiesta, and "capitalism" is the cause they fight against. Of course it contains "meaning".
Communism, on the other hand, is at least a valid idea. Its by no means viable, because its in direct conflict with human nature, survival instincts, intrinsic properties of physics and a bunch of other issues, but as a concept, communism is kinda cool.
I'm not contesting that feudal lords were a thing. Certainly not in the middle ages. To what extent that was still the case around 1890 - I'm not sure. I wasn't around back then. I don't think feudalism is a thing in the present, at least not in central europe.
If you want to study this whole class system, Nietzsche does a lot better job of explaining is and is way less pathetic about it. "Morals as a concept are installed by rulers to keep their sheep in check, deal with it".
- Marxism and Communism may be closer to each other than anarchism and communism, but they are not the same thing. Marx called for a peasant uprising. He's just pissed about the fact that the value created by peasants ends up in the hands of their owners.
- There is no autocratic rule in the free world. France elected a "capitalist" in sarkozy because they were pissed with financials. Then they elected a socialist in whoever the current guy is. Now theyre pissed with financials. Next, they are electing either the lunatic Le Pen who claimed that ebola bombs should be dropped on romania because it would give them both valuable scientific data and eliminate a bunch of people that the world doesnt need.
- Germany is ruled by the two big parties for a long time now because they are so close to each other in ideas and anyone who deviates from the mainstream is called a nazi or an evil capitalist or some other hate inspiring nonsense that you can only vote for her.
- The US was very fucking sure about the fact that they would elect the wall streets darling. Everyone knew it. People didnt even cast their vote because obviously the orange one would not win. Now he did. And people seem to forget that that guy was elected. Hes a fucking moron with the potential for Hitler stardom, but people elected that guy. That was not wall street. That was people who voted for change. Now they dont get change and they get fucked over because the guy is in it for the money but they certainly got whom they voted for.
-You're right, it had the feudalist mode of production for that time. With the advent of the USSR, it had the state-capitalist mode of production. On what basis do I declare this? On the basis of Marx's definition of the capitalist mode of production.
It doesn't really matter what you declare this. I know that its not communism. Its never communism. But at what point do people accept that every time a country tried communism, everything went to shit? It clearly doesnt work. I mean it works for no one. No one achieves anything worthwhile in communism experiments. Not a single person. But a whole lot of them end up in gulags.
And I'm not saying that communism is bad. But the results that came out of communism are so spectacularly bad, EVERY SINGLE TIME, that trying again is unethical. People think that Hitler was a bad person, but Mao achieved thrice the kill count without even trying.
> What issues are you talking about, in particular? I think the requirement to sell one's labour to a class of property owners is a rather big issue.
I'm talking about the fact that Russia is ruled by a person that was formerly part of the KGB and really wants his big soviet union back - and backs it up by moves like blatantly annexing parts of other countries whenever possible. The baltic states are shitting their pants a lot, these days.
I don't feel particularly exploited, btw. We live in a very free world. If you don't want to sell your time, just don't do it. Start your own company. See how that goes. We are all capable of taking chances. Some win, some lose. Some don't even try. Somehow, those who are too weak, or preoccupied with other things, are blaming those who did try, for the fact that they have relatively easy lives.
I'm often confronted with the fact that I was "lucky" and only get to have such thoughts because I was lucky. The thing is, I was lucky. I was born in central europe. Thats already jackpot worthy. We constitute way less than 10% of the worlds population and live like gods by default. The worst of the worst hobo in germany is way better off than almost anyone in bangladesh.
And I was probably a lot luckier than that. Other circumstances.
But we are all really fucking lucky that in the past, some entrepreneurs were fed up with the fact that there was no running water and that water was always infested with mud and bacteria and doctors didnt think it was cool that 5 out of 7 babies died of the common cold. And they solved those problems. And became rich. If there had never been an option to become rich in the first place, how many of those guys would have pulled a Picasso instead and just painted? If you take away just 10% of the useful inventions made by people who only got ambitious because money, where would we be today instead?
If you can make the argument that the rich benefit from the peasants getting redistributed funds, you should also be capable to make the argument that the worst of the worst peasant today lives like a god, compared to the richest of the rich just 100 years ago. And thats not hyperbole. Travel back 100 years and tell the still reigning king of Germany just about the bottom tier technologies we have access to. I'm pretty sure they'd consider that blasphemy.
Markets are different from capitalism. The fact that you don't consider it a stage of human history is strange, as capitalism has origins in a series of historical events. The Wikipedia article on capitalism is very good for this.
>obfuscates that and tries to reason that there is some oppressive force, exhibited by a ruling class, over the peasantry
No, Marx talks about the bourgeoisie and the proletariat being the two classes which engage in struggle in our capitalist society. However class struggle is not unique to capitalism, it is, as Marx describes, the history of all struggle hitherto. Now there are other minor classes aside from these in society, as there were in Marx's time - the petit-bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat. However peasantry was largely used to describe the feudal mode of production.
>I don't think feudalism is a thing in the present, at least not in central europe.
Many parts of the world had not yet emerged from the feudal mode of production around Marx's time, and large swathes had not even seen large industry expansion. Even in Lenin's time, the functions of capital were not as developed in Russia as they were in other European nations (Germany and England being those leading the industrial revolution); in fact, Lenin split with his contemporaries on this, those opposed to him, the Mensheviks, believing that Russia had not reached capitalism yet, thus a revolution would be inappropriate and doomed to failure.
>"Morals as a concept are installed by rulers to keep their sheep in check, deal with it".
Marx also talks about the common forms of morality, family, justice etc. as bourgeois distinctions, as do his contemporaries such as Max Stirner and Bakunin.
>Marxism and Communism may be closer to each other than anarchism and communism
Marxism is not a form of society, it is a method of analysis, which originated in political economy but has since been carried over to various other fields, ranging from geography to literature. Communism implies an anarchist society, as Communism is to do away with rulers, including those rulers of land.
>There is no autocratic rule in the free world.
I was referring to the method of organisation within a company or firm, not how countries are organised. In terms of country political systems, those which are parliamentary democracies are, according to the Marxist analysis, bourgeois democracies, to perpetuate and ensure the survival of the flow of capital.
>But at what point do people accept that every time a country tried communism, everything went to shit?
It depends, some take this position, and others do not. Communism and its sisters, including syndicalism, took root, such as in revolutionary Spain in which 2 million people were engaged in large-scale worker unions, with no bureaucracy, all voluntarily engaging. Same is the case with the third French revolution, when Paris was split into 48 communes, each coordinating with regular meetings the affairs of the revolution.
I think you have an uncharitable view of Communism or similar ideologies, especially given the much changed nature of our world since those times of revolution in the early 20th and late 19th centuries. Don't you think it should be up to modern day Marxists and indeed leftists of any and all persuasions to find and fix those errors?
>I don't feel particularly exploited, btw. We live in a very free world. If you don't want to sell your time, just don't do it. Start your own company. See how that goes.
Whether you feel exploited or not is irrelevant. This can be attributed to commodity fetishism and false consciousness as elaborated by Engels. Most people (especially in developing countries) do not have the opportunity to move out of the situation of selling labour-power for a wage, and even if most people did, there are still those who must do it. Just as the answer in a feudal system isn't "make everyone a lord", the answer within capitalism isn't to make everyone a property owner. There is not sufficient property (in particular land capital) to do this, anyway. Capitalism also requires large amount of wage labour, which would not be possible if the whole world were self employed, and we would resort to a bourgeois commodity exchange economy. Those born to parents without any land will not have any land. This is unfair in my eyes.
>Somehow, those who are too weak, or preoccupied with other things, are blaming those who did try, for the fact that they have relatively easy lives.
Hard work does not give reward, at least not within capitalism. This can be shown by those people who not only take large risk but they work hard too, and they're still wage labourers. And what perpetuates this? The system of property ownership. This had been identified indeed as far back as Rousseau and propagated and identified by all those anarchists and Communists through the 19th century.
Further, we do not blame those who try, we blame those who, in contempt of the idea that every man is born equal and free, hold property for their own profits. It is possible to try and succeed without holding property.
>If there had never been an option to become rich in the first place, how many of those guys would have pulled a Picasso instead and just painted?
This is ridiculous. People generally want to follow their passions, you are forgetting that a lot of development in technology happened when capitalism wasn't about, and indeed the scientists and inventors worked only because they were not oppressed by the rule of wage labour. Oscar Wilde talks about this in his book The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Those great inventors of the past usually did not work for profit at all, they worked out of the flame lit by curiosity, only resorting to the force of work when they had no money - again as a result of capitalism only affording people good life if they own property.
>the worst peasant today lives like a god, compared to the richest of the rich just 100 years ago.
And that's still not good enough. Saying that conditions have improved is just like saying "well, it could be worse" - in other words, the fallacy of relative privation.
> As with all IP, once created the value of a copy is pretty much zero. It's a simple case of supply and demand, the supply is infinite so logically the price is zero.
Read in a certain way (e.g. use of value vis–à–vis price), this is super Marxian.
(1) The nameless model of reality I think is implied by "marginal cost of production is zero" simplifies away some essential aspects of reality (as explained by the late, great, RIP Manny Lehman model of "software evolution"). As the article points out, bug fixes and updates of the existing copy are necessary (to wit, IoT botnets), and in this model one never speaks about the continuing cost to maintaining the zeroth copy.
(2) The anticipated rejoinder to observation (1) is that, given the source, the end-users can do all maintenance, customization, and extension themselves. What we know about complexity (again, thanks, Manny) of any non-trivial application puts the lie to this.
(3) The anticipated rejoinder to observation (2) is existence proofs such as the Linux kernel. My reply to this rejoinder is that Linux is largely corporate-supported as a complement to the supporters products/services.
As you say, updates/fixes also cost. So do marketing, web infrastructure and so on.
It's usual in business to charge for utility and perceived value ("As much as the market can bear"), not for the cost of mechanical assembly/reproduction.
OP is correct that Apple has created a new(ish) distribution model. It was a gold-rush for a year or three, but has become extremely unfavourable to new product development.
But this has become a curation and discovery problem, not a distribution problem. Apple's 30% would be a lot more palatable if discovery and search worked better, if buyers could opt-in to a mailing list to support newsletters, cross-sales, and future sales, if sellers could set up trials - and so on.
None of this is likely because the App Store is an example of the first law of aggregation - be the feudal landowner, not the peasant smallholder.
The App Store is immensely profitable for Apple. The law of aggregation means that Apple has no serious incentive to make it better.
The App Store won't change now. Eventually the entire platform will collapse and be replaced by a new technology in a new market space. But I wouldn't bet on that happening within five years, and possibly not within ten. (My best guess would be somewhere between those two.)
Meanwhile it's still possible to do well selling app development as a service instead of apps as a product.
So while yes they may value the good at the price they're willing to pay, they view the "fair value" at much closer to the marginal cost.
There's a saying about "a man knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing", that you might want to consider. By the way, if your toilet-as-a-service is always magically clean, nice smelling and stocked with a never-ending supply of toilet paper, I might very well be interested :)
Water allows you to live. Should the water company raise the price to €1000/liter ?
I think a lot of these relationships are very adversarial and people, companies included, don't have much of a choice in the absence of a wide reaching and binding understanding.
Thank you for proving my point: if it's scarce (only one company can make it) it has value. So the argument that the value comes from 'what it allows you to do' (not die) is bogus. Water allows you to survive so if utility determined the prices water would be extremely valuable, but it isn't.
$1000 water is ridiculous, but I'll bet that if I drop you in the middle of the desert, after 24 hours you'd be willing to pay $1000 for a liter of water. Yet it's the same water, you need it to survive wether you're in middle of the desert or at home. Clearly utility has nothing to do with value.
On the other hand, if I could do so, I'd just beat you up or worse and take that water. Which is what ends up happening when you see instances of piracy and IP violations around the world.
Eventually pricing also has to take into account, the point at which robbing you would not be worth the hassle for me, and we'd all be better off conducting a transaction. For example, GoG and Steam in the video game business.
Then we don't have to discuss which price is fair. Maybe some of them want to sell water at 1k/litre. Others won't. The market will figure it out.
This is price fixing. If microsoft and apple collude to fix the price of an engineer, you outcry. If you discuss what utilities should cost, prices fixed by monopolies is somehow ok.
That's why politics doesn't work. Not a lot of people have the balls to vote on principles instead of what they want for themselves.
And we don't have water utilities at all - I have my own well and septic system. Like all my neighbors. So in a sense there are many water companies?
If utilities are operated not for profit but as a form of charity, pricing of their services should be determined by how much they need to charge in order to stay in business (as low as possible). -> that makes arguing over pricing based on value irrelevant.
Anyway, agreed.
There's nothing wrong with that. I'm just saying that a monopoly that is not maximising its profits acts in a charitable way. Either by choice or by force. Kinda irrelevant.
The only reason they are selling the CD's for too much money is because there is no competition due to a government-granted temporary monopoly. The scarcity on that market it completely artificial.
If the software took you 5 years and €1M to produce, I as a customer will balk at any cost-plus price as my expected business value of using the software is say only €0.5M. But if you spread your costs over a hundred customers by copying (and maybe servicing) the same software, you can charge €0.1M from 100 customers, giving you €9M profit after your expense, and allowing each customer to derive around €0.4M business value. The value for both the producing and consuming side of the software was significantly increased simply by copying some bits :)
TFA specifically calls out the assumption that a one off (essentially micro) payment entitles you to lifetime updates and I think that is a very fair criticism.
Never say never. Years ago, the answer would have seemed to be an obvious" hell no", but these days with X-as-a-service it really seems like a lot of people would be perfectly happy to pay a per-use fee for their toilet as long as that means they never have to pay an upfront fee to have it installed or repaired. Just look at all the people happy to pay a recurring fee for Photoshop.
In theory that is what copyright does. If you make some software, you have a copyright on that software, but (unlike patents) not a copyright on any software that does the same thing. So if your total revenue is more than twice what it would cost to re-develop the same software then some other developer should do the math and go into competition with you. You, knowing that, would charge lower prices to begin with to avoid having to split the market with them.
The classical problem with this in Hollywood is that the big studios bought up all the distribution to lock out new competitors, which breaks that mechanism. You still see them trying to do this with cable TV set top boxes and so on. This is also similar to Microsoft's traditional game, but doesn't apply to most other software, which actually has quite vigorous competition.
The problem with what Apple is doing is that it breaks it the other way. Instead of companies leveraging a separate monopoly to thwart their own competitors, Apple is leveraging their App Store monopoly to siphon revenue that rightly belongs to the app developers. With the result that app developers make less than they ought to, which means that useful apps that ought to exist now don't because making them is not profitable against Apple's restrictions.
If you could somehow bundle your apps for free as part of the service and get a cut from that, I don't think people would have a problem at all with software. But I don't think most of the telcos are interested in that approach.
That's why I believe everyone should print their own counterfeit money:
• printing money for yourself does not deprive anyone else of their money, just like "stealing" a copy of a book, film, or piece of software does not deprive anyone else of their copy
• money (which is just pretty looking paper) has essentially no intrinsic value, just like a copy of a book, film, or piece of software (which are just bits)
The OP is exactly right: the only reason money has "value" today is because the supply is being artificially restricted: the value of a copy is pretty much zero. It's a simple case of supply and demand, because with counterfeiting, the supply is infinite so logically the price should be zero.
> The IP industry is trying to sell toilets on a pay-per-flush basis and then acts all surprised when people don't accept this and see no ethical problems with piracy.
Same with the banking industry.
The reason apps are so cheap is because there are so many substitutes.
Apple may be highlighting those who support multiple platforms, but its not telling anyone what to charge.
Musicians complain about the same thing as music gets cheaper and remains somewhat fungible.
It's no one's fault, it's just the reality of competition in an industry with zero marginal cost.
Ironically the one thing that might help is centralized gatekeeping with strict quality control. But that's not as profitable for the gatekeeper as the alternative, so I guess it makes sense for the gatekeeper to be a non-profit entity that can enforce rules, like a union or guild. I wonder when the world will realize that.
s/centralized gatekeeping/curation service/
Not sure about Apple's store, but you can get a refund without too much difficulty on Steam of the Play store.
Discoverability is a real concern though.
To me it seems that it's a bit of both: Apple store is definitely not doing enough to promote quality over spam; but it is also the case that this market simply allows more competition from below (aka disruption in its classic definition), which is not a bad thing.
This is in fact somewhat similar to music (and a lot of other industries -- my favorite example is the monologue from Boogie Nights about direct-to-video porn), where the people who have been hit hardest (and who seem to be complaining the most) are not even musicians themselves, but various people supporting professional music production. Well, surprise: turns out people are not willing to pay for quality as much as they thought it was worth.
That said, the lack of a paid upgrade option in the App Store is a significant negative. To pretend that a one-time purchase for $5 should guarantee you a lifetime of upgrades is both shortsighted and abusive to developers.
Buying Office 2015 only gets you that version.
If you want Office 2017, it's not an 'update' per se unless they generously offer it to you, but rather an entirely new piece of software.
I've seen it upfront two times in the playstore, where apps I liked released a new version. I was eager to buy the new version but the new/updated reviews for the old ones were ruthless. One app had to give the new version for free. The other had to promise to keep updating the old version too. The first team just gave up on both apps. The second team (one developer actually) continued but slowly toned down his efforts, going into essentially maintenance mode.
As I user I've had the opposite problem: developers who radically change an app that was perfect. I have no way to revert to the older version I preferred. If the developer had created a new app, I could have stayed on the old one. It's unfortunate most other users want unlimited updates. Paid upgrades and version selection remains an unsolved problem.
The lack of an ability to trial iOS software with no financial risk means that the risk of purchasing crappy software is priced in to the amount people are willing to pay. Think of it as a weird sort of reverse insurance. Every iOS software developer is "paying" (via lower prices) customers for insurance against crappy software and, unfortunately, there is a lot of crappy software, so the premiums are sky-high.
Apps that can show me a video or even a pictures/animations of the application in action I would also be likely to pay for. More often than not, though, I get treated to a powerpoint presentation or a short 3 sentence brief about what the app does that barely describes anything. And I also have no idea about the app’s stability or the likelihood of continued support. So how am I supposed to just trust that I’m getting $30 worth when I buy your software?
Similarly, pro bono work does not cheapen the value of a lawyer work. Working for $1 per hour does.
I am paying for the updates is how I see it. As long as people keep paying, they ought to keep working on it. The minute that stops seeming to be true, I will probably switch to other products.
As a developer I have bought many pieces of software to make my work easier: Git Tower, Kaleidoscope, PaintCode, Dash, Reveal, Charles, Acorn, Paw, are what come to mind right now. I perceive all of these tools' value to be high.
How many apps have you downloaded and how many are actually useful to you?
Speaking for myself at least, I've purchased quite a few mobile apps over the years. If I need an app in a certain category, I will always get one that costs money over one that's free with ads. I'm sure I'm in the minority, but people like me don't have to be the majority for someone to make money from an app. The only thing that matters is the number of people like me out there, not the percentage of total users we represent.
I do think there's much room for improvement of course. I wish they would do stuff like allow people to offer paid upgrades. But claiming that there are literally no good paid apps is just silly.
Apple encouraged a market of many cheap-as-in-shoddy $.99 apps instead of inexpensive yet useful and reliable software.
So basically they conned people into a walled garden without providing any of the benefits they explicitly(or implicitly) promised.
As long as they get 30% of fart apps, who cares, right?
I'm talking about the tooling, not the business model.
If anything, I think it's pretty impressive how Apple made paying for apps a viable thing, back in the days of rampant Internet piracy.
If you want to build and release small, incremental iterations of an application instead of major updated versions of an application then don't write software for iPhones.
And
>Ideally, make exactly one sale of an app per family. This reinforces the commodification of software; it’s to be shared around.
From a consumer perspective, I whole heartedly agree with author.
I own 3 devices, 1 is android and other 2 are Iphones. I never noticed how damaging this could be for developers to have their work sold for the price of one when most of the people use them on multiple devices.
Update part also makes sense, an application built 3 years ago has come a long way since then and have taken thousands of work hours for maintainance and updates.
So if I buy the 'license' to use your app, I'm gonna be real effin pissed if I can't use it on all my devices.
Actually tying your purchase to your Apple ID is much better for the dev, because only YOU can use it. A CD with software is much easier to share with your friends.
In a way, this is great. By charging less for software more people are able to enjoy your software and you make more money. It's a win-win.
I think the only (but major) issue here is that 30% is a laughably high cut for Apple. This cut is so high that only really popular software can be profitable for the developers. There's a lot of useful software that won't get built because it's niche and isn't profitable after 30% is taken off the top.
People are much more willing to give Apple their credit card number than some unknown (to them) web site.
Amazon works the same way. Just yesterday, in fact, I was looking for a replacement part for one of my tools. Google search turned up several options for the part number -- several "parts warehouse"-type sites and Amazon. The price was a couple of bucks higher on Amazon, but I bought it there nonetheless.
Why? Because Amazon already has my CC info, and I trust them to actually deliver the product and keep my information secure.
The other sites may be (in fact, probably are) trustworthy, but I don't know that. I have no idea how well they're securing my card information. I have no idea if they're even going to deliver the part in a timely manner. Amazon wound up getting my money, because saving two bucks just wasn't worth the risk and extra transaction friction.
Same thing with the app stores. The dev is providing the software, and Apple is providing the infrastructure and the reputation.
Is 30% too high for that? Maybe, maybe not. For an unknown dev, it may well be. If you're a well-known company with an established reputation, maybe it isn't. I've noticed that a lot of the big names (e.g., Bare Bones Software) have exited the app store of late.
I prefer to use Amazon or Paypal as payment options on those sites whenever possible
The evidence that I have actually heard[0] from valve indicates the opposite: that total revenue is unchanged by price. I am willing to believe that it can vary from product to product, but I am not willing to believe such an absolute assertion without any evidence.
I agree with your point about 30%.
0: https://www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video-game-economi...
"But then we did this different experiment where we did a sale. The sale is a highly promoted event that has ancillary media like comic books and movies associated with it. We do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40. Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation."
and then: "Twenty-five percent, 50 percent and 75 percent very reliably generate different increases in gross revenue."
In any case, out of all the issues with the App Store I think this one of app cost is the least interesting. Rather, the ever changing landscape of Apple approval policies and the severe platform lock-in effect is worse. Apple can more or less kill a viable business simply by denying an app in their store, and that removes the entire iOS market for that business with little to no recourse. This is the bigger deal I think. Figuring out how to get people to pay you $3 instead of $1 is less important I think, when you'll most certainly get $0 if you can't sell the damn thing in the first place.
I don't fully understand how Apple is allowed to effectively close off a significant market like this.
1) Free annual macOS updates.
2) Free Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand, etc.
This change forced Microsoft to drastically reduce the price of their OS, and to offer free upgrades to Windows 10 for a couple of years! It also prevents people who buy Macs from having to decide between Pages/Numbers/Keynote and the oft-times more familiar and business-friendly Microsoft Office suite. If they get the basic productivity apps for free, why bother with an Office365 subscription? Hell, offering GarageBand for free is undoubtedly undermining the business models of countless consumer-grade audio and mixing software developers.
It keeps Mac users within the Apple software ecosystem.
I don't think it's regional. I've never bought an app. I paid for some dev tools, but that's it. Selling productivity outside of people's work is an uphill battle.
It's not an easy thing to solve though, I think the promotion and discovery model should be changed fundamentally. First of all ratings and 'most popular' should be completely eliminated from the equation, because they are self-fullfilling and relatively easy to manipulate. I would like to see some form of syndication for apps, which suggests me apps that fit my preferences and use cases, which could (and likely is) vastly different from other people. For example, I would love to be able to find (by whatever means possible) more developer-oriented apps (either on desktop or mobile) for things I don't even know I could use. The current app store model provides basically zero opportunities for this, I can go to the 'developer section' in the app store and look at the top 25 apps but there my options to discover apps stops. There really is no way for niche apps that could find a decent number of paid customers to promote themselves.
Besides better app discovery, trial versions are really essential. I would like some kind of subscription service that lets me try literally every app I want, but only for one month after which I would have to buy it at the regular price.
Yet another idea could be to allow developers to join forces and bundle their apps, dividing the profits through some kind of agreed-on distribution. This way low-volume/high-margin apps that would be hard to sell in large numbers as standalone could piggyback on high-volume/low-margin apps.
Plenty of possible improvements.. At any rate I feel something needs to change, because the current situation is hurting creativity and decreasing the quality and value of many app categories.
And sure, maybe this way won't fit my mom, but often, lacking the drive to look for apps, is related with lacking the drive to pay for apps.
Reality is all the big internet corps have been doing this for a long time.
Then there are those of us who develop fremiums which further reinforce this behaviour.
Now we price our products north of 100/month to try and weed out the non ideal customer.
[0] https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/01/27/google-just-passed...
Microsoft wins hands down at the desktop experience though. If you have big or complicated documents and spreadsheets you can't beat Office.
For me personally, G Suite wins because by the time I need Word or Excel I'm going to reach for a full powered solution like Latex or Python.
Microsoft's 90s dominance was achieved by commoditising PC hardware, owning the OS market and the most profitable parts of the software market, and locking in the rest of the software market to their OS.
Apple and Google looked at this and decided that, rather than try to beat MS at their own game, they were going to change the rules to favour their own strengths. In Apple's case, that's hardware. In Google's case, that's web services and advertising.
Apple's strategy was to decommoditise hardware by making their products premium, desirable objects. Meanwhile, they gave their OS and its upgrades away for free, so decreasing the perceived value of Windows. Then they built a software market on top of their OS, one even more locked-down than in the old Windows model.
Google's strategy was initially to make the OS irrelevant by building the web into an alternative application platform. Then, when mobile arrived, they gave away Android for free in order to both encourage commoditisation of mobile hardware (discouraging Apple/iPhone dominance) and lower the perceived value of OS (harming MS/Windows).
This is easy for, say pharmaceuticals ("you'd like to live ? That'll be $5000 please. Patents mean nobody else can save you").
Likewise, software has the problem that replicating software is too easy, hence the value can't be captured. Imagine what would immediately happen if someone made an app that people would gladly pay $5000 for (e.g. one that somehow gets them interviews for a $100k job), it would immediately be replicated and sold for $500. And then $50.
Only where that is really hard can you profit. Software that for some reason can't be easily duplicated. Only Microsoft seems to have pulled that off, for very large and complex programs and even there the engine seems to be sputtering.
Larger article about this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...
To put it differently: how well would a small software business that is struggling under these conditions have fared 25-30 years ago when you had to advertise in print magazines and carry the disks to the post office for every customer (and every update!)? The fact that there is more competition now, isn't exactly Apple's fault either.
Today apps are competing with millions of other apps directly in the app store, anything you want it's been done and released free / with ads, so it's a whole different kind of difficult, probably more difficult than in the past.
E.G F2P games
Amazon are moving this way to an extent, at GDC 2016 the announced that you could publish your app for free on their app store for their line of tablets, and they would pay you per customer per minute of usage on your app.
Also, didn't exactly the same thing happen to music industry?
Now we can pay $0 for music, we just have adds interspersed between tracks.
The same thing will eventually happen to everything digitally distributable.
I would be interested in seeing data about how successful that program was at attracting actual consumers to the platform rather than just developers . . . .
In regard to your other points I also happened across this today: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/spotify...
Interesting how quickly these subscription services are losing money and how low the rate of return to the artist is.
Maybe Apple users are now trained to think all software should be priced like apps (I disagree with this, but am willing to consider it a possibility for a given group of the iOS user base) but Google meanwhile has trained a whole lot more users that all software should be free and they just need to put up with invasive advertising. I'd argue the latter is far more damaging than the former.
But in the grand scale of things, I guess this doesn't matter so much if you compare mac app sales versus iOS sales, thus the main point of the article.
I saw the problem as this: once a person has created a valuable software package, usually it costs nothing to rip it off.
Example: If I create the best kick ass calculator, with 10x better UX, better functionality. And charge $10. The learning has been done and the barrier to reproduce what I've created is almost 0. So someone does that, and remakes it, adds a photo sharing feature and charges $5. Then a student comes along and thinks "that's cleaver, but what if I add farting noises" and because He gets education out of it, make's it completely free. How does the first guy recoup his R&D cost? He can't really. It's too easy to reproduce.
I know this is a little simplistic, because there's the marketing effort and SEO. But it's hard to convince someone that they should buy the $10 app when there is a free app. Even if the paid one is better. (Which if you are a fan of fart noises, maybe it's not)
Who wants to buy fart app or doodle drawer for $200?
There's potential for games (it's possible to make or port RTS with great controls), but only on iPad connected to charger. Who wants this when there are PC and consoles? And what if you develop great new CelestialCraft&Conquer for 3 years, and users are willing to pay $50 for it, but then it's rejected by Apple? So everyone is making 3-in-a-rows.
If less money was being spend on the devices would more be available for apps, of would it turn out like the Android ecosystem where everything is cheap too?
There isn't. Developer and consumer have conflicting interests as far as price of the software go, and the price is set at a point where these interests meet. Of course, there are other variables (such as software developer being able to pay the bills) and parties (such as Apple) at play, but ultimately, this is, as always, just a matter of conflicting interests and resources that both sides have to influence the outcome. All discussions about what is "fair" or "right" in this situation have literally no meaning.
And these apps will soon be incompatible with the forthcoming 64-bit switch.
If it's their fault, what did they do to push things in that direction? What could they have done to have pushed things in the other direction?
I'm willing to listen to honest attempts to answer those questions.
I've played games where the first level is free and if you like the game, you buy more levels. I've tried productivity applications where the free version limits some quantitative aspect - like task managers that allow 3 projects.
Consider a couple of scenarios; in scenario 1 when someone publishes an App that is the only App of its kind available in the store. There are millions of phone/tablet users and you capture some some percentage of them and you make a few million dollars[1]. Scenario 2 is someone publishes an App in the App store, and it starts to sell well, then 15 additional people publish the exact same App in the App store and are so busy undercutting each other the price has gone down to 99 cents. But lets say this group of apps still sells reasonably well, then another 1500 people put out the same App on the store they all sell for 99 cents or are free with in game purchases. The original app creator made perhaps a few thousand dollars on the sale of the app. And all the people jumping on board made anywhere from nothing to a few thousand as well.
This isn't the first time that technology has released the creative spark in thousands more people, and as a result the market was flooded with new products that were vaguely similar. The industrial revolution had a similar effect it seems. As it became possible for more and more people to build things in a small factory or with less training and apprenticeship things got a bit out of hand and the thing that saved them was that if you patented your invention you could be assured (if you defended your invention against infringers) of a small monopoly to recoup your costs.
And if you had that sort of system today, you could invest all your time and effort and build your app and patent it and then not have to worry that hundreds of ripoff lookalikes of varying quality would dilute the market and the returns.
And yet it would be pretty silly to have a 20 year monopoly on an App that made fart sounds, but perhaps something more aligned with technology time frames like 5 years or 3 years.
The fundamental challenge is that it is always easier to 'reproduce' than to 'invent.' And if you cannot reward the inventors they won't be able to survive and we'll miss out on innovation that they might otherwise have been able to provide.
[1] Don't worry I don't think this is reality :-)
I'd challenge anyone to take an iPhone 4S, for example, with iOS 5 vs iOS 9 and tell me they're equally fast. Whats worse is Apple intentionally blocks you from going back to the 'factory state' on a device you paid hundreds of dollars on.
>When iPad sales slump, one explanation is often that everybody's old iPad is still working great and people have no reason to upgrade.
Yes, that sounds about right.
Especially for games; as soon as I see that I just assume it is another gem scam pay-to-win game. I would buy a lot more if it was easy to tell that something is a demo with a purchase specifically to buy (as opposed to gems).
> That means selling at a low price, because most customers will only pay low prices, and all customers prefer low prices.
Before Apple's excellent app store, how mainstream was it for people to talk about purchasing apps at all?
So people prefer low prices. Before this, they preferred not having software or piracy.
Now software pays for consumers. I wonder how much google spends every year on an average user.
The software is just an intermediary process step in the acquisition of consumer data and advertising dollars.
This is also why they keep coming up with new APIs that are only available on new devices. They need apps that only work on new devices to sell more of those devices.
Can someone explain to me this logic? It seems faulty. Put it this way: if it were somehow possible to make more money as a developer in the App store, how would removing Apple's 30% cut make it more feasible? Apple and developers have a shared incentive to make as much money as possible, but developers control pricing and who they target. Apple is just along for the ride.
> Build a universal app (iPhone and iPad versions, in the same package) to increase the attractiveness and convenience of owning multiple iOS devices. You’ll earn a “+” in your app’s buy-button on the Store. This teaches customers that supporting multiple devices isn’t something to pay extra for.
This is better, and fairer, than the alternative. My iPad and my iPhone run the same operating system. Why should I pay twice for the same functionality across both of them? If Apple didn't do this people would be writing articles lamenting the fact that they want to make their 30% cut twice.
> Also include an Apple Watch version within the iPhone app. As above.
I would be happy to pay to unlock Apple Watch functionality in apps. I'm not sure that Apple prevents that from happening. But I agree with the author here provided the extra functionality is not simply "notifications" but something meaningful and unique to the watch's hardware.
> Provide regular updates, at no cost; so much so that there’s no mechanism for paid upgrades at all. This teaches customers that they should expect free upgrades for life, no matter how little they paid for the software initially.
There is a mechanism for a paid update, which is to simply state end of life for an app and release a new one (a la Tweetbot). Another way of looking at this is: Apple is encouraging developers to release new apps at full price once they feel that they have something new to launch, OR to use subscription pricing or quasi subscription pricing like Marco does with Overcast.
> Make exactly one sale of an app per person, ever, regardless of the number of devices they own, how often the app has been updated since they last used it, and so on. This also teaches customers that they’re entitled to come back to a free app at any point in the future, no matter how long ago they paid for it.
That seems fair to me as a consumer. If I bought something a year ago and want to re-install it, why shouldn't I? Wouldn't it seem unfair to not be able to use something I paid for?
> Ideally, make exactly one sale of an app per family. This reinforces the commodification of software; it’s to be shared around.
"Ideally" = Apple does not enforce this.
> Sell only through their store, with their distribution mechanism, their product page design and user flow, and their 30% cut — which doesn’t provide for marketing or discovery of any kind beyond searchability, and the very small chance of being featured in some way. The majority of customers probably have no idea that the price they pay for an app is almost 43% higher than the amount the developer will receive, before tax (i.e. that Apple takes 30% off the top).
Which has done more for the security and quality of the software which is available to consumers. (And that's also a reason affluent middle class folks flock to iOS.) And Apple allows search marketing and of course doesn't stop developers from marketing in Google, Bing, on TV, etc. which is where the majority of installs are driven for most app-centric startups I know.
> Put it this way: if it were somehow possible to make more money as a developer in the App store, how would removing Apple's 30% cut make it more feasible?
30% is a pretty hefty percentage. It's the weakest point in the article but imagine if I just cut your salary by 30%, is your job still worthwhile?
> My iPad and my iPhone run the same operating system. Why should I pay twice for the same functionality across both of them?
Except it's not the same functionality. Try Evernote for instance ... does it LOOK like the same functionality? That's a lot of developer effort you can't recoup. You've just diminished all that extra work to support both modalities with a wave of your hand.
> That seems fair to me as a consumer. If I bought something a year ago and want to re-install it, why shouldn't I? Wouldn't it seem unfair to not be able to use something I paid for?
That thing you paid for 5 years ago no longer exists, the software you bought 5 years ago can't even RUN on your new iPhone, what you are getting, for free, is the thing the developer made this year, with actual work, which looks like the thing you bought 5 years ago.
> "Ideally" = Apple does not enforce [family sharing].
But they do encourage it. It's part of the diminishing effect. That you can opt out as a developer doesn't change that.
I'm unclear how this is a response to my response to OP. OP is saying that Apple forces developers to target the biggest possible audience by taking 30%. I'm arguing that Apple is agnostic and that if there's a way for developers to make more money in a niche then Apple is happy with that. And you can always price your software at +30%.
> Except it's not the same functionality. Try Evernote for instance ... does it LOOK like the same functionality? That's a lot of developer effort you can't recoup. You've just diminished all that extra work to support both modalities with a wave of your hand.
That's a distinction which isn't made in the article. Autolayout makes it trivial to support the same functionality across both devices. If you want to introduce new functionality with the iPad then have a separate app. I believe you're still entitled to do precisely that.
> That thing you paid for 5 years ago no longer exists, the software you bought 5 years ago can't even RUN on your new iPhone, what you are getting, for free, is the thing the developer made this year, with actual work, which looks like the thing you bought 5 years ago.
I don't understand this I'm afraid. If you're discussing the fact that apps sometimes need to be updated to keep running on the new versions of iOS then that's just part of the cost of business, but plenty of developers choose to not do this. Again, nobody is forcing developers to do this. Nobody is not buying your app because they think it might not be supported in five years time.
> But they do encourage it. It's part of the diminishing effect. That you can opt out as a developer doesn't change that.
It's only a diminishing effect on consumers if Apple encourages developers to do it and they do it. There's nothing forcing developers to do it. They're choosing to. They only have themselves to blame.
This is really a workaround to the problem that Apple doesn't support paid updates - deleting the old version and buying a new version (which has to have a different name) is not a great user experience for updating an app, and who knows how many users you might lose in the transition.
I think it would be much better if paid updates were part of the App Store, with a simple way for users to see that a paid update is available and to buy it if they choose to.
As software developers, why target the largest customer base instead of creating a product that people are willing to pay money for and target people who can and will spend money?
Apple doesn't target people who are only willing to buy a $60 unlocked phone or a cheap computer. Apple Stores are usually located in the most affluent areas in the country.
Build a universal app (iPhone and iPad versions, in the same package) to increase the attractiveness and convenience of owning multiple iOS devices. You’ll earn a “+” in your app’s buy-button on the Store. This teaches customers that supporting multiple devices isn’t something to pay extra for.
I wouldn't pay twice for the same app to run on my 13" laptop and my desktop, why should I pay twice for the same app for my iPhone and iPad?
Provide regular updates, at no cost; so much so that there’s no mechanism for paid upgrades at all. This teaches customers that they should expect free upgrades for life, no matter how little they paid for the software initially.
It's clunky, but app developers are doing paid upgrades via app bundles.
Make exactly one sale of an app per person, ever, regardless of the number of devices they own, how often the app has been updated since they last used it, and so on. This also teaches customers that they’re entitled to come back to a free app at any point in the future, no matter how long ago they paid for it.
How is that different from any other software? I can still run old Win95 software today.
Sell only through their store, with their distribution mechanism, their product page design and user flow, and their 30% cut — which doesn’t provide for marketing or discovery of any kind beyond searchability, and the very small chance of being featured in some way.
It's always been the responsibility of the producer to market their products and make it stand out. Coke and Pepsi don't depend on the stores to advertise for them.
The majority of customers probably have no idea that the price they pay for an app is almost 43% higher than the amount the developer will receive, before tax (i.e. that Apple takes 30% off the top).
I think consumers know there is a markup to what they buy in a store.
Unless you're selling a game, selling an app in the store is not the way to make money. The companies that make money from apps are using the apps as a front end for a service consumers want.
I made more money in 2008 as a "mobile developer" working on Windows CE devices for a company that produced a service that other customers want than most indie app developers make today.