The marginal cost of software is not always zero. You may have cloud cost, support erc.
Open Source Apps (2013)
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: Open Source Apps (2013)
#22Apps don’t “want to be free”; customers want to try before they buy and there are not a lot of sane options presented for doing that in App Stores. Why the hell isn’t there a simple “download now, pay if you keep more than 4 hours” kind of option, for example? Why no simple “upgrade to version 2.0 for 50% off” option? There are lots of common scenarios that app stores should provide , saving developers from having to…
Who would have thought that an utterly unaccountable, monopolistic centrally-planned market could turn out poorly.
Re: Open Source Apps (2013)
#23> What makes the software market so fascinating from an economic perspective is that the marginal cost of software is $0. I see this claim a lot. The marginal cost of software is actually its support cost﹡. If some customers bought the product without a support contract, then the marginal cost of the good that is sold to those customers is the (non-zero) cost for support staff to categorize them and turn them away. I…
Having more users even on the free plan gives many benefits:
- more testers means that bugs are detected earlier. This improves reliability.
- it gives more opportunities to try to sell the support and convert them into paying customers
- it increases the visibility of your product. It is free advertising.
IMHO, the marginal cost is generally better than zero.
Re: Open Source Apps (2013)
#24Can a monthly subscription support a collection of open source apps? Netflix style. Maybe give donors the option to vote on features. I am interested in testing if there is a market for this. I've started writing clone android apps without the ads and freemium.
I think it can, and to your second point, Steam had a great system with Greenlight which let potential customers vote on what their games would look like before hand
Re: Open Source Apps (2013)
#25Can a monthly subscription support a collection of open source apps? Netflix style. Maybe give donors the option to vote on features. I am interested in testing if there is a market for this. I've started writing clone android apps without the ads and freemium.
For web apps, there is https://cloudron.io. Pay 15 per month to install apps and get automatic updates.
Re: Open Source Apps (2013)
#26Apps don’t “want to be free”; customers want to try before they buy and there are not a lot of sane options presented for doing that in App Stores. Why the hell isn’t there a simple “download now, pay if you keep more than 4 hours” kind of option, for example? Why no simple “upgrade to version 2.0 for 50% off” option? There are lots of common scenarios that app stores should provide , saving developers from having to…
> Why the hell isn’t there a simple “download now, pay if you keep more than 4 hours” kind of option, for example
So, one thing I've seen a _lot_ of new apps do is basically this; but sadly, includes some annoyances itself.
Instead of "download, pay after x hours", they instead have a subscription model gating most of the features of the app. They give you 1 (week|month) free, as that's easy to do with in-app payments automatically. Of course, now you have to remember to cancel this subscription if it turns out it's not what you're after, which is annoying, albeit pretty simple on iOS.
Re: Open Source Apps (2013)
#27> What makes the software market so fascinating from an economic perspective is that the marginal cost of software is $0. I see this claim a lot. The marginal cost of software is actually its support cost﹡. If some customers bought the product without a support contract, then the marginal cost of the good that is sold to those customers is the (non-zero) cost for support staff to categorize them and turn them away. I…
Having more users even on the free plan gives many benefits: - more testers means that bugs are detected earlier. This improves reliability. - it gives more opportunities to try to sell the support and convert them into paying customers - it increases the visibility of your product. It is free advertising. IMHO, the marginal cost is generally better than zero.
It's a trade-off.
The benefit is "reach" which is beneficial for (a) marketing (b) OSS community (c) bugs and contributors.
The cost are the (a) lower conversion to payment (b) costs from a 'shared' community e.g. community management and user support.
Re: Open Source Apps (2013)
#28There are too many counter-examples for this to be true: - Microsoft has been charging for years for Office before getting into the recurring payment model. The reason they got into the recurring payment models is that most office software requires server support and server support is a recurring cost - There may be future competition but let's not forget that software still costs money to develop. ie. if an entrepre…
You've answered your own implied question. The price of MS Office is still high because it's in a category of its own, with no competition in sight. But all it takes is one well-motivated competitor to achieve feature parity and that would be the end of MS Office's cash cow position. MS is already offering Win10 basically for free. Not because of competition, but because it doesn't cost anything to make it free. They…
It's tough to make that argument.
Features are only a small part of how users consider change - and 'parity' definitely doesn't cut it.
Office is a good example ...
StarOffice originally and then RedHat, Suse, Mandriva (and the previous versions), Canonical and a host of other commercial Linux vendors I'm forgetting, plus Sun, IBM, Linux Foundation, etc have all put resources into competing.
OpenOffice is feature equal for most users - but, it didn't make much of a dent.
For me the Windows 10 situation is partially about competition, but it's mostly about protecting their core market. For the most part they make money from corporate users, not users buying 300 dollar laptops - those are just market capture for the serious money. Any time you hear a parent say "Jonnie is learning MS Office" (not word processing) that's a future corporate buyer.
Re: Open Source Apps (2013)
#29Apps don’t “want to be free”; customers want to try before they buy and there are not a lot of sane options presented for doing that in App Stores. Why the hell isn’t there a simple “download now, pay if you keep more than 4 hours” kind of option, for example? Why no simple “upgrade to version 2.0 for 50% off” option? There are lots of common scenarios that app stores should provide , saving developers from having to…
>>> Why the hell isn’t there a simple “download now, pay if you keep more than 4 hours” kind of option, for example?
There is on Google Play but the window is only 2h.