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Comment by xpaulbettsx | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea why the dev is choosing to take a major hit in her reputation that she clearly worked pretty hard to build through great design and code, for no reason other than "I don't want to spin up a separate build".

And for what? If you're gonna burn through your company's rep, at least get something out of it. Contrast this to what another Indie Mac dev did when confronted with the same situation:

"Free updates to the 1.x product will continue for paid customers of TapeDeck. It means a bit of extra maintenance on my part, but I will do my best to keep my existing customers happy."

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I might even understand if she would say something like "It's not worth it to me and I'm not going to do it... Sorry."

But what baffles me is that she has continued to imply that she hasn't done anything wrong, made a point to say that people are overreacting, and even questioned their sanity. Wow. PR nightmare.

I can't tell if it's a PR nightmare or not. A quick look at Twitter shows a ton of people claiming that they're purchasing copies just to support her. Her company is certainly getting lots more press than it has in a while.

Good point. I guess I more accurately meant it would be a PR nightmare for me... I just couldn't feed good about pissing off so many people, even if it did ultimately increase my sales.

Oh definitely. And the (to my eye) overly supportive reaction has most definitely surprised me - my impression was that we expected more from small devs, not less; but if Microsoft, Google, or Apple had made a similar move, I don't imagine it would have been met with a throng rushing to buy the new version to support the company in the face of a few people being inappropriately rude. Will be interesting to see what effect this has on Sophiestication long term.

That's not support, that's Stockholm Syndrome.

Why doesn't she simply offer App Store coupon codes to existing users? Seems like that would solve her "PR" problems, and they expire after their first use so there shouldn't be any worry of piracy or anything like that, as with serial numbers.

As far as I know, you only get 50 of those per release.

Per version, I believe. You have to game the system a little bit for that, but that's what Marco does according to the Build & Analyze podcast, from what I recall.

I can't verify this right now since I don't have anything in the mac app store, but I had heard that promo codes are not working yet.

Source: http://twitter.com/#!/majicDave/status/23220997280768000

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