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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 sof
by joshfraser 16y ago
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, $5 is still well within the average teenagers reach, it's still a lot more friction than free. This decision seems short sighted to me even if the effects of it aren't immediately apparent.
- igrekel 16y agoRight... and 5$ is hard to pay when your a teenager, just because you don't have a credit card yourself.
- jonursenbach 16y agoTeenagers might not have credit cards, but they receive iTunes gift cards as gifts, which they can now use on Xcode.
- rbanffy 16y agoiTunes gift cards are not abundant resources everywhere.
- jonursenbach 16y agoI have never been to a retail store where I didn't see them available.
- rbanffy 16y agoWhat countries have you been to?
- jonursenbach 16y agoSpeaking of purely US-only experience, of course.
- zach 16y agoThey'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.
- rbanffy 16y ago> iTMS cards are purchasable at every (...) or what-have-you in the USA. Outside the USA, what do you do?
- ojilles 16y agoEither buy the gift card in your country, or alternatively get a US gift card on eBay.
- rbanffy 16y agoSee the kind of convoluted procedures this silly price is making people do?
- phoobahr 16y agoPlus 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.
- ojilles 16y agoI 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.
- potatolicious 16y agoI'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.
- jonursenbach 16y agoI 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.
- plusbryan 16y agoIt'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.
- jarin 16y agoSeriously. 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.
- elai 16y agoThe whole using a credit card online adds a lot of hesitation for parents, even if it's $5. It did for mine.
- potatolicious 16y agoThe $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?
- Dobbs 16y agoIt'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.
- jarin 16y agoEspecially 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.
- pyre 16y agoAre 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?
- earino 16y agoOnly people in certain countries matter. Most of the world just pirates software.
- godDLL 16y agoThat 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.
- earino 16y agoHow 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?
- godDLL 16y agoIf you read my reply again you'll find the answer to both 'how' and 'why'.
- earl 16y agoConsidering 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.
- plusbryan 16y agoRight, but who bought them that mac?
- evilduck 16y agoIf 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.
- J3L2404 16y agoI 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.
- rbanffy 16y agoRemember there are places in the world where you can get a Mac but can't get an Apple store account.
- jbrennan 16y agoMaybe nobody. Maybe it belongs to Mom or Dad.
- uxp 16y agoWhen 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.
- stcredzero 16y agoAnd 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 $5000 seats, the friction was hella high. Then Java came along with tools that weren't 100th as cool, but which were frictionless and free. It's kinda the playbook for being a superior technology with an earned reputation for coolness, then losing anyhow because your userbase doesn't grow as fast.
- rbanffy 16y ago> Java came along with tools that weren't 100th as cool That's one hell of an understatement...
- stcredzero 16y agoThat's one hell of an understatement... I just want to relate the experience, not start a flame war. Java tools are pretty darn cool nowadays.
- rbanffy 16y agoStill, Smalltalk is seriously cool. I think the pricing was only one factor of Java's success. Smalltalk, for the C programmer, is pretty alien. No source files, no compiler... That takes some to get used to. Java provides a nice path towards OOP that's more forgiving than C++, yet, it's aesthetically compatible with C.
- ScotterC 16y agoCompletely agree Josh
- ScotterC 16y agoCompletely agree
- 38leinad 16y agoif someone can afford an apple pc, he for sure can also afford 5$ for a good software! if anything, this should teach the teens that good software can also have a price.
- stitchy 16y agoYep, 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...
- schellack 16y agoIf 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.
- masklinn 16y agoWe 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)
- recoiledsnake 16y agoXcode isn't included on Macbook Air.
- aaronbrethorst 16y agoWhich 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/ http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/ [2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/default.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/default.aspx
- larsberg 16y agoRight -- 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.
- runjake 16y agoAnd 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.
- reubenyeah 16y agoAs 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.
- neutronicus 16y agoCS majors love them some Visual Studio.
- goalieca 16y agoteenagers dont often have credit cards.