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Comment by joshfraser | Hacker News Reader

Seeing this reminded me of a Microsoft focus group I was invited to be a part of a few years ago. As a CTO who had decided to build everyone on top of free software, they wanted to know what it take to make me to switch to a Microsoft stack. I told them they were 10 years too late. You see, I made the decision to use LAMP stack not because it was cheaper, but because it's what I knew. And the reason I knew LAMP stack was because that's all I could afford when I was 15. The question for Apple isn't whether businesses or experienced developers can afford their development tools, it's the teenagers they should care about. And while, $5 is still well within the average teenagers reach, it's still a lot more friction than free. This decision seems short sighted to me even if the effects of it aren't immediately apparent.

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And while, $5 is still well within the average teenagers reach, it's still a lot more friction than free.

Smalltalk companies did this to themselves, but with a smaller userbase and bigger fees. (Which is worse in both dimensions!) With $5000 seats, the friction was hella high. Then Java came along with tools that weren't 100th as cool, but which were frictionless and free.

It's kinda the playbook for being a superior technology with an earned reputation for coolness, then losing anyhow because your userbase doesn't grow as fast.

> Java came along with tools that weren't 100th as cool

That's one hell of an understatement...

That's one hell of an understatement...

I just want to relate the experience, not start a flame war. Java tools are pretty darn cool nowadays.

Still, Smalltalk is seriously cool.

I think the pricing was only one factor of Java's success. Smalltalk, for the C programmer, is pretty alien. No source files, no compiler... That takes some to get used to. Java provides a nice path towards OOP that's more forgiving than C++, yet, it's aesthetically compatible with C.

Version control also seemed an issue - commercial Smalltalks had tools like Envy - but all the projects I observed in the telecoms world seemed to have a senior developer doing nothing but merging images for the duration of the project.

Indeed. Having source files helps a lot. Smalltalk images suffer from Amish Bread Syndrome. Not being able to build your image from sources and sources alone is disturbing for me and I learned OOP with Smalltalk (later moved to Actor on Windows, but, still, without source code as text files).

Okay, I'll bite. "Amish Bread Syndrome"? The Googles do nothing.

http://www.armchair.com/recipe/bake002.html

The Googles lead me to Amish Friendship Bread, which requires a starter that you have to get from someone else. Thus, without the starter you can't compile your bread from sources. At least, that's the best I can come up with in three minutes. :)

all the projects I observed in the telecoms world seemed to have a senior developer doing nothing but merging images for the duration of the project.

Envy had a few pathologies, but I think there were pathologies in the projects as well.

Great, so all someone needs to do is make a decent Cocoa IDE (don't forget Instruments and an iOS simulator!) and give it away for free. Problem solved.

> Great, so all someone needs to do is make a decent Cocoa IDE

You can start from here: http://www.gnustep.org/experience/DeveloperTools.html

Not so much if you want to do any iOS work.

If doing iOS work isn't worth five dollars to you, than how much you can be said to "want" to do it is up for debate.

I get the impression everybody is preaching to the choir here for the most part.

Yes, the solution to you not willing to pay $5 is for someone else to invest hundrends of thousands of dollars (at programmer's market pay) to re-implement XCode.

I do develop open-source software (SumatraPDF) and give it away for free, but this kind of attitude of entitlement always gets me.

My point exactly. Although if someone really does want to re-implement Xcode, more power to them I say! Me, I'll pay the 5 bucks.

This is a lot harder than just paying $4.99 for Xcode, but I wonder how difficult it would be to adapt GNUstep's developer tools to Cocoa development.

How about a bunch of us pay $5 to do that? Kickstarter project?

JetBrains is working on an IDE for Cocoa developer and guess what it wont cost 5 bucks thats for sure.

http://www.jetbrains.com/cidr/

If you look at Facetime on the Mac App Store, it costs $0.99. If you get a new Mac, though, it's free (included). Xcode has historically been included on the install media for OS X (e.g., with Snow Leopard). It's still a separate install, of course. I expect Xcode 4 will still be available on the OS X Lion install media. Buy OS X 10.7 and the media will most likely include Xcode 4. This is a normal Apple pattern.

We shall see. But this $5 is a lot higher than what they charged for in the past (though the 802.11n drivers were $3 I believe)

Xcode isn't included on Macbook Air.

Right... and 5$ is hard to pay when your a teenager, just because you don't have a credit card yourself.

Teenagers might not have credit cards, but they receive iTunes gift cards as gifts, which they can now use on Xcode.

iTunes gift cards are not abundant resources everywhere.

I have never been to a retail store where I didn't see them available.

What countries have you been to?

They're in pretty much every major supermarket in the UK and Ireland.

iTunes cards are available in most supermarkets and electronic stores in Switzerland.

Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think they even exist in Portugal.

Speaking of purely US-only experience, of course.

They're a lot more abundant than the Mac you need to run Xcode on, though.

iTMS cards are purchasable at every 7-Eleven and nearly every major supermarket, Wal-Mart, Meijer, Target or what-have-you in the USA. You can buy Xcode with $5 in nickles if you have access to a Coinstar machine.

Let's be realistic, the hardware demands are much more serious than $5 on an iTunes card. The problem here is the message Apple is sending.

> iTMS cards are purchasable at every (...) or what-have-you in the USA.

Outside the USA, what do you do?

Either buy the gift card in your country, or alternatively get a US gift card on eBay.

See the kind of convoluted procedures this silly price is making people do?

Plus until recently you couldn't use a gift card in Canada to purchase anything in the AppStore. Or an American paypal balance, or a canadaian checking account through a verified American paypal account.

I don't understand? I don't like Apple's geographically segmented marketplace either, but in the end it's not too big a problem to get around.

I'm trying to think of what would've happened if I had to ask my parents for their credit card every time I had to download some tool when I was a kid just messing around with programming.

I probably wouldn't working in the field today, that's for sure.

I definitely agree with you, having grown up on free tools, but $5 is a lot easier to ask a parent for than $99/year to get access to this kind of stuff.

It's doubtful that today's parents need to be convinced of such things. Not only is $99 cheaper than that piano of yesteryear, it also has a significantly higher rate of return.

Seriously. If one of my kids asked me for 5 bucks to buy Xcode, I wouldn't hesitate for a second. I wouldn't even make them do the dishes first.

The whole using a credit card online adds a lot of hesitation for parents, even if it's $5. It did for mine.

The $99/year thing is not terrible. I remember saving money from my paper route to buy tools/lib licenses to some specialized things I really wanted.

Selling your parents on a single $99 purchase is a lot easier than trying to sell a $5 purchase every week. 'Tis just the way it is.

jarin below mentions he wouldn't hesitate buying his kid Xcode for $5... that only works if the parent is in the field also. How many, say, accountants or lawyers would buy their precocious coder-child a bunch of tools or understand the importance of it?

All the hypothetical teenager would have to do is point them to one of the many news articles about other teenagers making millions on the App Store.

>"I remember saving money from my paper route to buy tools/lib licenses to some specialized things I really wanted."

Today, a teenager would say, "What's a paper route?"

s/paper route/burger flipping/g?

Problem is you need a car first.

On the other hand, I begged and pleaded with my parents for weeks to get a copy of Microsoft BASIC, and later on a modem.

So not only did that lead to me being a programmer for a living, I got some negotiation skills out of it too.

Was the world less credit card centric when you were a kid? It may be different now.

It's not about money it is about investment. $5 dollars means you have to invest into the system. Free means that you just spend a bit of time downloading and installing. If you stop using it after a half hour who cares. Money though has a higher barrier of entry.

Especially when a sense of entitlement is free!

You can get Visa gift cards at the convenience store for $10. If a teenager can't find the motivation to scrounge up 10 bucks, they're going to have a hell of a time learning how to program.

Are you sure that this:

  You can get Visa gift cards at the
  convenience store for $10.

Applies everywhere in the world? Or is it only people in certain countries that matter?

Only people in certain countries matter. Most of the world just pirates software.

That is cruel and incorrect. People pirate software everywhere.

Many successful hackers were brought up in places where $5 is nothing to be sneezed at, and the dance of getting-that-$5-into-Apple's-pocket can cost you more than that in time and effort alone.

How is that cruel? When talking about revenue generated by software firms only people in certain countries matter. How much money do you think apple makes from the entire african subcontinent, for example? Why should apple give a crap about making it easier for that group of people to purchase their developer kit?

If you read my reply again you'll find the answer to both 'how' and 'why'.

You and I obviously have different definitions of cruel.

Also, "Many successful hackers were brought up in places where $5 is nothing to be sneezed at".. so fucking what? The revenue they bring to the table is immaterial. They don't matter to a large company.

Visa is everywhere you want to be.

Yep, that's why I avoid commercial operating systems like the plague. It's why I initially became a gcc based C++ engineer. It's why I then became a Tomcat/Java engineer. And it's why I'm currently messing around with Android.

Friction is a good word for the problem. Who knows? Maybe in another life I would have actually used Microsoft's stack. I used their tools in college, and at work when they were provided...

Right -- and providing dev tools and server platforms for free to students at the high school and college levels is why the MSDNAA and DreamSpark exist on the MSFT side of things.

Of course, it took literally a couple of years to get each of those programs started. I remember spending months just arguing back and forth about whether or not an edition of Office should be in MSDNAA (since it is a development platform, from the point of view of add-ins, Access, etc.) and how much lost revenue it would be.

And how popular is DreamSpark? I signed our organization up for it, did all the hard work and provided easy download instructions & serial keys. I had exactly 0 (zero) takers.

It's just still too convoluted compared to the OSS options out there. Everyone uses PHP, Python or Ruby.

I realize that Microsoft still has 90% of the personal computer market, but it all reads like the last days of Big Blue to me. The king is still king, but the writing is on the wall.

And this is not a Linux neckbeard saying this.

As a current uni student, I have access to both DreamSpark and academic alliance, I probably wouldn't even have windows on my dev computer otherwise, let alone any of the dev tools and the being able to access free quality software from Microsoft really improved my opinion of them and it's important to get that mindshare of new developers if they want to stay such a huge force.

CS majors love them some Visual Studio.

Which is one of the biggest reasons why Microsoft's Developer Division created and gives away the Visual Studio Express product line[1], and supplements it with websites like the Beginner Developer Learning Center[2].

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/ [2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/default.aspx

if someone can afford an apple pc, he for sure can also afford 5$ for a good software! if anything, this should teach the teens that good software can also have a price.

teenagers dont often have credit cards.

Considering that you still need a mac, I don't see how much difference it makes. Note that I still think it's a terribly stupid idea.

Right, but who bought them that mac?

If we're arguing about imaginary teenage hackers to fit whatever argument we need...nobody, they're running a hackintosh on a $200 netbook and they're pirating XCode anyways.

I imagine this will be like xcode for iphone only working on intel macs. You could develop (but not release) on PowerPC mac by changing a couple plist keys, and apple still sold a lot more macs anyway.

Remember there are places in the world where you can get a Mac but can't get an Apple store account.

Maybe nobody. Maybe it belongs to Mom or Dad.

When talking about teenagers (the 15 to 19 year old crowd), they may not be the ones buying the Mac directly.

I also think this is an unnecessary and dumb idea.

Completely agree

Completely agree Josh

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