Comment by J_McQuade | Hacker News Reader

Comment by J_McQuade | Hacker News Reader

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To be honest, I thought it was a joke to start with - look at what he compares it to!

For 10bucks, I can get four iced espressos at Starbucks, eight bags of Swedish Fish, 9 soft serves from McDonald’s, or nine 99cent iPhone apps, etc., etc.

Ignoring the crappy maths towards the end there, I can't think of one time where I've been faced with a piece of software that could potentially enrich or ease my life on a day to day basis and thought "Hmm... maybe I'll just pig out on ice cream instead."

I had no idea that the software engineer had become so devalued. Seeing how greatly that point overshadows the rest of the (probably quite useful) piece, I can't help but think techies aren't really the intended audience.

It's a buyers market -- that's for sure. It's not so much that $10 is a bad deal but more so that BeeJive 3.x for the iPhone simply doesn't work right. For $10 it's less functional than a $0 IM app. I doubt the developers are to blame however they should examine their choice to work for a company that will release non-functional software with a (comparatively) high price tag. They'll be out on the street working for a company like that and that's the ultimate devaluation of developers IMO. I tend to doubt these guys were saying "Yep it's ready! Ship it!" they were probably asking for more time and someone in management decided it was too risky to let the competition get a head start on Push Notification support. They may have even calculated that someone who spend $10 with no obvious ability to get refunded would perhaps stick around while the developers had a chance to fix the many horrible bugs. Bad business.

I think you're being too charitable. The fact the author talks about getting a refund for a game by falsely claiming it was purchased by accident and goes to great lengths to discuss getting the refund, all the complaining on Twitter, etc. It's pretty clear the author sees $10 as outrageous.

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