A cautionary tale: various major Xto7 woes …

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Simon Ubsdell] “By that token, we’d be better off getting these kind of products direct from IA and their like rather than from the App Store.”

But once is comes from the App Store, is that possible?

That also means that you’d have to download the version at the AppStore, then download the update separately if the updated version is different from the AppStore version.

I don’t know, bit of a conundrum.

Jeremy

[Simon Ubsdell]

I think what I was saying is that the App Store model probably ultimately suits the third party developers commercially but it potentially slows down the process of the updates actually getting to us. So that we as end users would have been better off if they hadn’t published via the App Store= but sold the main product and delivered its updates to us directly through their own site.

All rather hypothetical, sorry 😉

Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Bill Davis]

Simon,

The App Store model provides two things that are both pretty valuable.

For the consumer, the “Vetted by Apple” approach makes sure that malicious code and system screwing mistakes are (hopefully) filtered out.

For the authors, they don’t have to operate their own back-end “e-commerce” engines – which is a huge time and effort savings.

I actually think it’s a pretty efficient model and both sides benefit.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Simon Ubsdell] “Agreed – but is it entirely for the good of the consumer, as I think perhaps you might be suggesting?
“

Not entirely, Simon.

But the consumer seems to value “speed of access” over quality consistency right now.

I suspect App store purchases are often “impulse” buys. And if you’re searching for – say – a plug-in – you’re likely doing so because you have a problem you need to solve immediately.

So the value proposition is based on becoming the “vendor of choice” for that user when confronting “problems like this” – rather than your current product becoming the ONLY tool they’ll purchase.

So initial sales are driven by being first to market – and long term sales will be driven by satisfying customers, as it’s always been.

There’s little penalty on being “imperfect” if you’re first to market – as long as you diligently improve things from that point on.

The App stores distribution model allows the “perfection-process” to be both rapid and on-going.

I think this is a powerful new business model. It’s not without it’s hassles, but it seems to be what’s working in the marketplace.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Bill Davis] “I suspect App store purchases are often “impulse” buys. And if you’re searching for – say – a plug-in – you’re likely doing so because you have a problem you need to solve immediately.”

I think the issue here is that there is a huge discrepancy between the kind of Angry Birds impulse app purchase that you are describing and the hopefully considered kind of purchasing decision when acquiring a commercially critical product like xto7, to pick and example out of thin air.

When buying this I wasn’t casually browsing the App Store wondering “what shall I spend my pennies on today?” but rather I was going there because there was a product recommended by my peers that I was counting on to solve an urgent business need.

Surely there’s an important difference here.

This is why I get a little riled when people suggest that buying some novelty light leaks plug-in is somehow on a par with buying a mission-critical app like xto7. I don’t think the two things have anything in common despite the shared distribution model. If the light leaks plug-in has a bug, I don’t really care and I move on. If the FCPXML translator (or whatever) has issues then it may have a critical impact on my ability to deliver to my clients and hence a potentially damaging impact on my business.

Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com