On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 11:20 PM, Joe Data <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Nov 20, 4:27 pm, "Peter Becker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> I personally think that: >> - Karsten is right in that shrink-wrapped has the best margins and >> still is a big market to make money in >> - this market is dying fast, thus not the future as you claim (Karsten >> didn't say that) >> - you are right that Sun is ahead of the curve and suffering the >> problems of being an early adopter > > Why do you think that consumers / businesses don't want to pay for > software anymore? I think they do.
Consumers will keep paying for products that are perceived as premium and thus make them feel better about themselves. Then the act of spending the money is actually important to gain the value intended. In other areas software becomes a commodity and as long as it works well enough the cheapest option is the best. Linux is getting there in some areas (think netbooks), OOo is catching up. They both still suffer from not being mainstream enough, but I give that another 2 or 3 years and MS will find it harder and harder to raise their taxes on new hardware. Businesses is a whole different story. For a business the initial cost of software is only a small prices to pay (put some "TCO" phrase in here if you like). They (should) look more at the long-term support, the effect on their organisation and similar issues. But the shrink-wrap model doesn't make sense for them either. A major reason why shrink-wrap doesn't make sense for no software customer is that it gives all the wrong incentives for the producer. As someone selling shrink-wrapped software you make money by selling new versions. Why would people buy new versions? Usually for new features. So your first priority has to be creating new features. That means bugfixing and other QA gets unimportant as long as there's not too much complaining. It means that a general consistency of your UI or other design questions are mostly irrelevant. It means that you get MS Word, which IMO is a good example of how software should not be. Most customers are not yet aware that this business model is hurting them, that's why MS has so much resistance against their ideas of going for subscription models. It's probably noone trusting them either, but that is another effect of the shrink-wrap model IMO. Subscription makes sense for software. OSS+Support contract makes sense for software. And in many ways those two are just two variants on the same theme, especially when you consider the marketing idea of having different prices for different people to get the most money out of each of them: if you charge everyone the same you'll have people who would have been happy to have spend more and others who leave your product since they deem it too expensive. So you really want to seperate the market into different price segments and having different subscription/support plans makes that easy. It's just that OSS starts with free community service and usually has a different attitude around the project. But the boundaries are blury, companies like Trolltech and IntelliJ have managed to produce non-OSS products in a style very similar to the OSS ones. > In fact, we just witnessed the > birth of a new platform for that - Apple App Store which sold $30mln > worth of software in its first 30 days (http://www.newsfactor.com/ > story.xhtml?story_id=61264&full_skip=1). Two reasons I see for this: a) no established OSS market b) premium market I don't know what happend to that application charging the highest possible price for putting an "I'm rich" type logo on the screen, but I believe that guy had the right idea: a lot of the customers on the Apple app store are there with a lot of money and a lot to prove. The product they buy is as much a badge as an utility, so taking the utility out of the equation makes sense :-) The programs I use most on my E65 are: - Nokia Podcasting - Opera Mini - Nokia Maps - 5d0ku (or some similar weird spelling for a Sudoku game) - Frozen Bubble - Fring (Instant Messanging) All free. Admittably that's partly due to the fact that I'm currently on a very small budget, but I seriously can't think of any application I'd buy if someone gives me $500 to spend on phone applications. Opera Mobile would have been one, but the Mini actually works better for me. Apple's world is a different one, but it is only marginal. I think the appstore model will be more mainstream for a while, and I expect the Android version to catch up and Nokia et al to come up with better versions of selling software on their platforms, but it'll last only a few years until the OSS products really hit the phones. It's a good market for OSS since the applications are comparatively compact. > I think we as software developers have a jaded view of the world - > we're tech savy, we use lots of open source software, and we think the > rest of the world is just like us (that's why we generally suck at > creating user interfaces). No, the rest of the world is different > and, from what I can see, is quite happy to still pay for software. I don't know many people who are happy to pay for software. I'd claim compared to my friends and acquaintances I'm probably one of the people who spends more money on software than most others (games excluded -- that would put some other people up front). I still believe that in most cases the OSS model is much superior to shrink-wrapped and still slightly superior to subscription models. And try to get your average consumer committed to a long-term subscription -- it will be hard. > Why does Microsoft and IBM and Oracle still sell more software each > year when you have free / open-source competitors for most of their > products (OS, office software, collaboration, database, app server, > tools, system management)? If you talk about the enterprise world: since they sell a complete package, which is exactly what Sun tries to do now. Both IBM and Oracle actually mix a lot of OSS into their offerings and even MS is slowly warming up to that idea. And there is a lot of cultural resistance. I'm currently have to deal with recruiters who don't accept CVs in any format but Word. While I much prefer working in OpenOffice (assuming I have to use one of these tools), I still do a last editorial run in Word -- so there you have another sold licence of MS Office. One day people might finally learn that it is not ok to use editable formats (and particularly not Word) for business exchange, but that'll take a while. And they will also learn that Word is not a good storage format, I think some large enterprises and some governments around the world have gotten that idea by now, which is why MS started supporting OpenDocument. It'll take a few more years, but the momentum is there. > I think that open source software has pushed commercial software > forward and replaced some of it, but I think they will co-exist for a > very long time, maybe forever. Yes, I agree. There will always be new markets and they are better suited for a shrink-wrapped or at least subscription model (I avoid "commercial" since I see a lot of commercial OSS). But once a market is mature and the products become commodities OSS will take over since that's when that model shines. If you look at networking stacks or something like Apache you see how far that can go. And it currently happens for JEE servers. > What I do see happen is that a lof of > desktop software moves into the "cloud" as web / Flex / Silverlight > applications, but I think most of this will be subscription-based > (except for a somewhat crippled free offering); there are only so many > ads to go around, and Google servers most of them, which is why Google > can afford to give most of their products away for free. The cloud is a whole different topic, which I might skip for now :-) I'm not yet sure how far that can go, I for one still find it hard to submit critical information to some remote entity. Peter --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. 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