Making Money

2009.10.03   prev     next

Everybody knows Galbraith is talking about Apple here. And after Netscape author Jamie Zawinski complained that Palm’s “App Catalog” policies are every bit as bad if not worse, Galbraith (now with Palm) promises to make it better.

Galbraith and Zawinski may be on the same page with this. But in this case, being on that particular page may mean failing to understand the fundamental shift that is taking place.

Once upon a time, computers were the realm of guru wizards who wrote cool little, two-day apps that didn’t make money, but impressed their computer-loving friends. And, they casually pirated commercial software, figuring that anyone who was trying to make money off of this guru box had impure motives, and probably was rich enough to not miss a lost sale anyway.

But Apple has created something new. An environment where piracy is effectively blocked by the platform maker, and the third-party software developer doesn’t have to worry about trying to protect against it, nor about being negatively impacted by it. An environment where buggy apps are detected, declined, then fixed and resubmitted, all before the end-users ever see them. An environment where the author makes not 10-15%, but 70% of sales, and so isn’t afraid to price the app for high-volume sales. An environment in which the end-users can choose from well over 75,000 apps after less than two years of third-party development on a platform barely past two years old. And which is rapidly growing.

But for the hobbyist, tinkerer-wizard, who has no interest in tackling the many-month task of writing a quality commercial app, who just wants to write little free apps, bizarro system customizations and whatnot — it’s kind-of a nightmare.

You can’t do that very easily on the iPhone. And, since Palm is trying to replicate the iPhone in every way they can, Zawinski had a similar experience trying to make his two little pieces of freeware — a tip calculator and a digital clock with morphing digits — available on the Pre. Maybe Galbraith will change that. Maybe he won’t.

Maybe it won’t matter either way for the Pre.

Update 2010.03.08 — With the iPhone App Store, Apple’s created an environment in which it’s easier to buy the apps than to rip them off for free. (Not cheaper, of course, but easier to do.) It’s the other way around in Mac OS X or in Windows.

(And if you calculate how easily the typical person can get one or two dollars, you might easily come to the conclusion that buying the typical app is actually cheaper than ripping it off.)