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Casady & Greene Says "Goodnight"
powderhound writes "Longtime Mac software publisher Casady & Greene have said their final 'Goodnight.' The publisher of many notable Mac titles such as SpellCatcher, InfoGenie, iData, and Glider Pro, have decided to close the doors on July 3rd. Their web site contains the details of their decision. They will be sorely missed."
They must have gotten a pretty penny for SoundJam. C&G had to realize that, with OS X making Conflict Catcher obsolete, SoundJam was their future. Or did they really expect Glider Pro carbon to sell like hotcakes?
I've been scratching my head about C&G's business strategy and expecting this day ever since OS X was announced.
Care to be asshole buddies?
I think as Mac OS X becomes more ubiquitous, we'll witness a renaissance of Mac development and publishing. It's already showing with products like Transmit and Hydra (to name just a couple).
I'm pretty new to the Mac world -- an OS X convert... so I've never heard of these guys. But it sounds like the timing might have followed that of the introduction of the new OS. Was their inability to keep going due to something about OS X?
I love this operating system, but I sometimes wonder how much all the goodies that come with it (X11, iTunes, iPhoto, iChat, Safari, Mail.app, Address Book.app, and iCal are all in my Dock) are hurting independent developers who innovated for the platform before Apple got around to incorporating those functions into the OS.
We contacted them when we were looking for a publisher.
They wanted 85%, wanted to delay payments to us for up to 180 days,
if they wanted new "features" either we had to implement them or
they would pay to have it done and -we- would have the cost deducted
from royalties. We said no thanks.
When talking to them, the SoundJam/iTunes thing happened a few months earlier
and I asked the guy about it. He said that Apple approached them,
with a fixed price. They advised them to take it, or get buried by an Apple product.
He wouldn't say how much they got, but it wasn't a huge number, plus they had
to relinquish the programmers as part of the deal. I like Apple, and I like iTunes
and what it's become, but Apple sort of rolled over them and they never recovered.
All these things were the downfall of Casady and Greene. We still use Spell Catcher X on our photographers' laptops because Adobe hasn't put a spell check into the File Info window and our photographers are the kind that need a spell check on their captions. There was a place they filled a gap. Spell Catcher X is really a powerful tool and far beyond just a spell checker. That is an example of how to add value to a software that's previous functionality has been subsumed by the growth of the OS.
.Mac or free from Sourceforge, the competition just exploded. That's why, as an independent publisher or developer, you really have to inovate if you still want to make a living off shareware.
.Mac, and the popularity of sites like Versiontracker and MacUpdate, the necessity of a developer needing a publisher has drastically reduced.
I always waited for Conflict Catcher to do the same. There was room for it. It would have need to be completely rewritten, but the basic concept is sound (looking for conflicts). If they'd had found a way to do a Clean-Install System/User Merge under OS 10, CC would have easily regained its throne.
I don't think C&G had the reources or maybe even the dedication to make the kind of investment leap to really make their tools valuable for OS 10 users. Between the explosion of freeware apps and open source projects, and cheap hosting on
They were always more a publisher than developer, so and with resources like Sourceforge and
At least most of their developers have taken their software with them.