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> it's culturally accepted to pay a couple of dollars for a fart simulator app, but most people won't pay a dime to access the New York Times content in a web s

> it's culturally accepted to pay a couple of dollars for a fart simulator app, but most people won't pay a dime to access the New York Times content in a web site. That's the reason why most apps are apps rather than web sites, but that's a problem with the web, not Apple's business Brill! The funny thing is, the price of 'software' has often really been driven by the price of distributing it, not the value it delivers or how much it cost to create it. (Joel Spolsky has pointed out this is why Enterprise Software costs so much: because it costs so much to sell software to Enterprises). The App Store really takes the friction out of the business of distributing binaries, including the friction out of marketing it. So it should come as no surprise that a lot of really good software is cheap in the app store. It won't be long before you won't be able to charge for the NYT in the app store either.

hga 17y ago
Nit, but he pointed out there isn't much in the way of software that's priced between $1,000 and $75,000: "There's no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I'll tell you why. The minute you charge more than $1000 you need to get serious corporate signoffs. [Etc. And to get that you need a salesforce and so on.] And with all this, the cost of making one successful sale is going to average about $50,000. If you're sending salespeople out to customers and charging less than $75,000, you're losing money." (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...)
- raganwald 17y ago
  Are we in violent agreement? The cost of sales is part of the cost of distribution. Part of why the App store lowers prices is reducing the cost of spitting bits, but most of why it lowers prices is by reducing the cost of marketing software to users.
  - hga 17y ago
    Cordial agreement, more like it. Joel was talking almost entirely about the sales effort, not so much about marketing (although you need a much more expensive marketing effort if you're playing the big sales force/big ticket sales game at the upper end, if only to establish your company and/or brand). And I really wonder about lowering the cost of marketing. I don't know at all how this Apple App ecosystem works, but it seems to me that rising above the crowd and noise of 100,000? 1 million (if not now, soon enough) apps means you need serious marketing of some sort, or a stroke of luck where your app goes viral without much connected effort on your side. The generally greater interconnectedness of today probably has a lot more to do with lowering the cost of marketing than anything having to do with the App store ... although that'll e.g. depend on its search function and how and if people use it. I note that Amazon gets by with what is by far the worst search engine of any site I've used in years.
- lpsmith 17y ago
  I can think of a lot of software that's priced in the $1000-10000 range.
  - hga 17y ago
    I've wondered about that and wondered how much of that is due to a total sale adding up to much more than $10K? And of course that's not a hard rule, there can be software priced in the middle where a less strenuous effort on the part of the corporate buyer gets the job done on his side (and many think that a major reason for corporate software piracy is not that the corporation can't afford it, but that it's so hard to get a purchase order through that borrowing a disk from someone across the hall is by far the path of least resistance). And maybe this help explains some major failures, like Centerline's Code and ObjectCenter (interpretive environments (with interpreters, but you often just load compiled code on the fly) for C and C++ that are as close to a Lisp Machine as you could get for those languages). Also, the $1,000 limit is undoubtedly too low, it's whatever your corporation allows you to spend without too much effort (e.g. CxO signoff). A few thousand dollars are OK, e.g. that's how PCs slipped into a lot of companies, on departmental but not corporate budgets. (Heck, that's how a few Z-80 CP/M machines slipped into LMI when we had at most 3 CADRs operational at a time and a strong bias against doing anything outside of a Lisp Machine.)

hga 17y ago

Nit, but he pointed out there isn't much in the way of software that's priced between $1,000 and $75,000: "There's no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I'll tell you why. The minute you charge more than $1000 you need to get serious corporate signoffs. [Etc. And to get that you need a salesforce and so on.] And with all this, the cost of making one successful sale is going to average about $50,000. If you're sending salespeople out to customers and charging less than $75,000, you're losing money." (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...)

raganwald 17y ago
Are we in violent agreement? The cost of sales is part of the cost of distribution. Part of why the App store lowers prices is reducing the cost of spitting bits, but most of why it lowers prices is by reducing the cost of marketing software to users.
- hga 17y ago
  Cordial agreement, more like it. Joel was talking almost entirely about the sales effort, not so much about marketing (although you need a much more expensive marketing effort if you're playing the big sales force/big ticket sales game at the upper end, if only to establish your company and/or brand). And I really wonder about lowering the cost of marketing. I don't know at all how this Apple App ecosystem works, but it seems to me that rising above the crowd and noise of 100,000? 1 million (if not now, soon enough) apps means you need serious marketing of some sort, or a stroke of luck where your app goes viral without much connected effort on your side. The generally greater interconnectedness of today probably has a lot more to do with lowering the cost of marketing than anything having to do with the App store ... although that'll e.g. depend on its search function and how and if people use it. I note that Amazon gets by with what is by far the worst search engine of any site I've used in years.
lpsmith 17y ago
I can think of a lot of software that's priced in the $1000-10000 range.
- hga 17y ago
  I've wondered about that and wondered how much of that is due to a total sale adding up to much more than $10K? And of course that's not a hard rule, there can be software priced in the middle where a less strenuous effort on the part of the corporate buyer gets the job done on his side (and many think that a major reason for corporate software piracy is not that the corporation can't afford it, but that it's so hard to get a purchase order through that borrowing a disk from someone across the hall is by far the path of least resistance). And maybe this help explains some major failures, like Centerline's Code and ObjectCenter (interpretive environments (with interpreters, but you often just load compiled code on the fly) for C and C++ that are as close to a Lisp Machine as you could get for those languages). Also, the $1,000 limit is undoubtedly too low, it's whatever your corporation allows you to spend without too much effort (e.g. CxO signoff). A few thousand dollars are OK, e.g. that's how PCs slipped into a lot of companies, on departmental but not corporate budgets. (Heck, that's how a few Z-80 CP/M machines slipped into LMI when we had at most 3 CADRs operational at a time and a strong bias against doing anything outside of a Lisp Machine.)