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Make it free or fail – a real world test (launch day)

1 points by kanebennett 16y ago

TimJYoung 16y ago
I'm kind of with you on this. I'm not sure that certain segments of the software world have done themselves any favors by giving businesses and consumers the idea that software should always be free. No other industry works this way, where the core product is given away for free and the actual income must be garnered through donations/advertising/?. Developing a product for fun is one thing, but taking the extra several months/years to polish it and make it saleable, along with setting up the necessary infrastructure to do so, is something that requires some possibility of profit. Without this possibility, most developers won't bother, and we end up with a ton of half-completed software projects that may have been something good if seen through to the end. I see this as especially a problem with developer tools/languages, which are experiencing serious fragmentation and "language of the month" symptoms on the free side of the market, while also experiencing significant consolidation among the big players on the for-profit side of the market. A symptom of this dysfunction is that the biggest platform (for all intents and purposes, it is a "platform") in the world right now, the browser, only uses a single language - Javascript. I can't think of any platform in the past 40 years that only allowed the use of a single language. Just to clarify: trial software and any business model that allows potential customers to try out software before buying is a perfectly legitimate business model. Giving away software for free, getting a bunch of users, and then dumping the project because you can't afford to support it anymore, is not. Such a model is a recipe for chaos and an industry in constant turmoil.
frobozz 16y ago
I can't see how this experiment will work. By making this announcement, Kane has skewed the results in favour of the free model. The "control" group will consist almost entirely of keen early adopters and well-wishers, with a handful of people who stumble upon the software without seeing this blog post or anything related to it. Everyone else will wait for the freemium period to start.

1 points by kanebennett 16y ago

I'm kind of with you on this. I'm not sure that certain segments of the software world have done themselves any favors by giving businesses and consumers the idea that software should always be free. No other industry works this way, where the core product is given away for free and the actual income must be garnered through donations/advertising/?. Developing a product for fun is one thing, but taking the extra several months/years to polish it and make it saleable, along with setting up the necessary infrastructure to do so, is something that requires some possibility of profit. Without this possibility, most developers won't bother, and we end up with a ton of half-completed software projects that may have been something good if seen through to the end. I see this as especially a problem with developer tools/languages, which are experiencing serious fragmentation and "language of the month" symptoms on the free side of the market, while also experiencing significant consolidation among the big players on the for-profit side of the market. A symptom of this dysfunction is that the biggest platform (for all intents and purposes, it is a "platform") in the world right now, the browser, only uses a single language - Javascript. I can't think of any platform in the past 40 years that only allowed the use of a single language. Just to clarify: trial software and any business model that allows potential customers to try out software before buying is a perfectly legitimate business model. Giving away software for free, getting a bunch of users, and then dumping the project because you can't afford to support it anymore, is not. Such a model is a recipe for chaos and an industry in constant turmoil.

frobozz 16y ago

I can't see how this experiment will work. By making this announcement, Kane has skewed the results in favour of the free model. The "control" group will consist almost entirely of keen early adopters and well-wishers, with a handful of people who stumble upon the software without seeing this blog post or anything related to it. Everyone else will wait for the freemium period to start.