I agree that they shouldn't have been surprised at the additional load. If I were distributing a product that included a server component, I doubt I would have let Amazon give it away it for free.
Support is something I've been taking for granted myself. At ~50k copies of my free version worldwide (including copies from non-market sources), the support requests have been low enough that I can handle them all myself, but if 1M copies were out there, I'd need to set up a better support infrastructure. Tim On 8/2/2011 5:03 PM, Joel Witherspoon wrote: > I can't side with Shifty Jelly on this one. Anyone that's been to any > kind of business school knows that the more you increase demand, the > more your product will cost. In SJ's case they are going to have to > spend more - quickly - to support their product. They should > have expected more downloads with the free application and been ready > to compensate for load. > > This is a tragedy but hardly tragic. Read the contracts. > > On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 1:02 PM, Nathan <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > I got the "generous" offer from Amazon. People here told me how little > I knew about marketing when I was hesitant to accept. > > I didn't take it because it seemed to benefit Amazon more than me. > Unlike the people in the article above, my app is not an experiment, > it is my livelihood. > > Since then, another app in my niche did take the offer, and was > severely punished for it. They got a pile of negative ratings with two > themes: > 1. People who obviously had no clue what the app was for. > 2. The sheer number of new users overloaded the servers and made it > look like the app was broken. > > I'm sure Amazon benefited. > > It might be different if I could consider the price of giving my app > away for free as zero. If your app requires any ongoing maintenance, > tech support, or server resources, this cost isn't zero. > > Amazon did sell my app for 50% off for a while. As far as I can tell, > all that did was divert a certain amount of sales from the Android > Market. > > And what happened to Amazon's (never officially acknowledged) Android > tablet? Did the de-open sourcing of HoneyComb stall that? We may never > know. > > Nathan > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Android Discuss" group. > To post to this group, send email to > [email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > <mailto:android-discuss%[email protected]>. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en. > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Android Discuss" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en.
