5 ms·

I don't believe I've ever had fun buying PC software, but that platform went somewhere. What is your reason for believing the smartphone market is different?

• Groxx 16y ago
  "somewhere" being primarily Microsoft, Adobe, and virus scanning applications, all of the above for large amounts of money and frequently purchased as necessities. The market for smaller desktop applications is pretty hard, and seems to mostly get along by the PC user-base being utterly massive, not by any ease-of-use. Applications on OSX are a bit nicer, as there's rarely an install/uninstall process at all, and an enormous amount of the people I know with macs have bought several smaller applications for various minor needs. Nothing that can't be faked by text files / Excel, but a nicer interface makes a difference. Things like Sparkle also mean people update far more frequently. I don't see that much in my Windows-using friends, especially in the non-geek sectors. But OSX has a much smaller market share, and I have a feeling that a lot of the successes are due to things like MacHeist, pulling in $1/2 million+ over a couple days, which do make buying software fun. One can argue that they also dilute the money pool by devaluing them when not on sale, but the amount of effect that has is nebulous at best.
• extension 16y ago
  Because there is competition in the smartphone market, and someone has already raised the ante from "not fun" to "fun".