On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:52 PM, Richard Gaskin <ambassa...@fourthworld.com>wrote:
> > Maybe. Personally I think piracy is overrated in terms of sales impact. > Perhaps. But in the case of mobile phones, not so fast. Here's why. As commercial developers, we all pretty much know our job is to deter the casual pirate-- the one who just 'borrows' a copy from their buddy. That's the guy we don't want stealing our product, because he MAY purchase it. IOW, you may have *just lost a sale.* On the other hand, those who are professional hackerCrackers, and those who follow them on BitTorrent, etc-- they WILL STEAL your product, but they will almost NEVER buy your product. No sale lost there. Now, I know you don't own an iPhone, but I can tell you I've spent WAY more money on apps than on the damn phone. And the majority of these apps are just to try them out. Rarely-- RARELY are they up to snuff and provide me any real actual value. I'd say for every app I purchase that I like, I have ten more purchased which are just plain junk, or I have no need for. Just like the price, the bar is set really low compared to desktop software. In fact, I've even tried asking authors to please charge more so they can develop more and better features! (Disclosure: I don't count games among these apps as I'm not a game player and only download Scott Rossi's games just to marvel at his creativity!) Fact is, this system of selling apps for $0.99 is, IMO, broke. We all know only the top 100 apps of the available 1M (0.1%) actually make enough money to live on. Furthermore, it's pretty much impossible to find what you want in the AppStore as Apple only shows you what they want you to buy. I guess I'm a bit more of a capitalist, and rather let the free market decide rather than have Apple anoint the winners and losers. Anyway, getting back to the main point-- because you really can't try before you buy (most apps, not all apps), and there's no refund policy, Apple forces people to purchase even the crappy stuff. So, of course there's zero piracy in a closed system like this, but in an open system, like Android, developers are forced to actually create decent software before someone will pay for it. And of course we all know how to create software which the casual user won't steal ;-) _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode