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MacHeist "Week of Mac Developer" Causes Schism
ernesto99 writes "MacHeist began selling a software bundle of ten highly sought-after OS X applications last week with the stated goal of raising the profile of Mac shareware developers. 25% of the money brought in goes to charity. The bundle sale will go down as possibly the biggest success in Mac shareware history, as total revenues are approaching $650,000 after only six days. But some observers, including Daring Fireball's John Gruber, have called into question the ethics of MacHeist. MacHeist advertises itself as 'The Week of the Independent Mac Developer,' yet the MacHeist organizers stand to make vastly outsized gains relative to the very developers they have championed. Gruber calculates that MacHeist will record double, if not triple, the profits of all ten participating developers combined. (In fact the promotion has done so well that the promoter-to-developers profit ratio now stands at about four to one.) In an interview, Delicious Library developer Wil Shipley defends his involvement in MacHeist, saying that the publicity and reach of MacHeist has already paid him dividends. The whole affair has created a heated dialogue, resulting in a direct clash among some of the biggest names in the Mac community."
While I've never worked on a retail shrink-wrap piece of software, I've yet to work on any piece of commercial software in a corporate setting where the developers get anywhere near a quarter of the revenue generated from the sale of that software.
If the individual developers have agreed to the terms and conditions of participation, and said terms and conditions were clearly stated, what's all the rucus about? I'm failing to see how this is newsworthy....
Compared to typical Retail sales, unless they reach there $400K target, it is approaching, or at least similar to typical Retail markup.
If you ask these developers what they expect to make in a typical week, and it's less than $5-8K then the fact is, they are increasing their cash flow.
Which may increase their sales in the next Upgrade cycle.
Speaking as a devoted Mac user and advocate for the platform, this whole affair has shown the worst aspect of the Mac community and why so many people continue to write off the platform (an assembly of particular hardware and software) because of a small percentage of the user base (an assembly of people who use the hardware and software).
Ultimately, though - and I say this as a more-than-daily reader of the Daring Fireball website - John Gruber of Daring Fireball is to blame for this. He is the one that posted the initial exposé of what he perceived the financial situation of the MacHeist promotion to be, even though he admitted multiple times in the article that he didn't have any first-hand knowledge of how the thing was actually structured. John is often a fine voice for the Mac-core community, which is why I read his site, but this is one of those times (and there have been others) where his sharply-worded articles have done much more harm than good.
Ultimately, it benefits no one for developers to be running around calling each other four-letter names because of perceived injustices. Both sides - but especially the anti-MacHeist side - need to stop talking at a volume and profanity level that makes casual observers think somebody is being tortured. Perhaps both sides should just stop talking about it period.
One thing is very clear from this: while the Mac-core constitutes probably fewer than 5% of all Mac users, they continue to give a bad name to the entire assembly of very well-designed and nice-to-use software and hardware. As they've done practically since day one. Am I the only one that thinks they sound like televangelists sometimes?
I really didn't know about this and besides this "schism" thing I think it's incredibly interesting that they managed to sell $100K+ worth of software per day for six days. This tells us a lot about the relative size of the OS X installed base and the willingness of said base to buy software. I think the shareware model could do a lot for the Mac, much as it did for the Windows platform 10+ years ago. The more quality software (applications) available for a platform, the more people will be able to consider switching to it.
Where there's a good margin, competition will follow.
Quite. The developers should look at this as money that they'd otherwise not have got. That someone else made more money at the same time is largely irrelevant.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Oh please, you paid what you thought was a fair price. Now you're upset because someone else gets a better one than you did, completely by chance? There's no reason to begrudge anyone because they got lucky or because the developers found a way to pick up some extra cash -- You got exactly what you paid for.
But, why? You obviously were willing and able to pay the price you did for a product you felt you needed. If in a week he offered a sale, would you be as outraged? What about if in 6 months he has a new version but continues to sell the old version for half-off? Differential pricing doesn't hurt anyone (at least for this type of product and this type of differentiation).
Video game consoles sell at a premium when they first come out, and people are willing to pay that premium. Later on, the price goes down, people who wanted it but couldn't afford it before pick it up. The manufacturer still turns a profit, but a smaller one. They still get more product out into the marketplace.
What if he sold at a different price to China, Zimbabwe, and the US? It it still as heinous?
According to what theory does the price of production need to be reflected in the price of purchase? Is movie popcorn also "completely irrational?" Bottled water? Novels? Perhaps sports franchises should not charge per seat because after the first seat is sold it costs the same amount to play the player's salaries? There are many business models out there and Richard Stallman does not define which are rational and which irrational.
I generally agree with the parent, that if I as a developer agree to give away my product for free to increase visibility, no one should complain about that. And as the sibling post says, everyone wins in this deal...
TFA is highly misguided.
But this deal is much BETTER than that. First, promotion is hard. The idea that promotion bringing much greater sales isn't worth anything implies the speaker doesn't know anything about business. I bet there's NO product where you couldn't spent 100,000 in advertising correctly and manage to get 10,000 in sales. (Obviously, that would be stupid.) But the better you do it AND the more money you spend on it the more sales you get. The idea that MacHeist didn't bring TREMENDOUS value to the table in terms of successful marketing.
Second, MacHeist put up all the money for it. They took a gamble on their successful promotion. If they hadn't sold enough, they'd have lost a lot of money. The developers only risked the possibility that a lot of people might get licenses to their software... adding to their mindshare and marketshare in historically valid software marketing. (The traditional downside is that people will see your software as valueless if you gave it away... but wait, in this case they paid for it.) The other way to run MacHeist (the only really different one I can think of) is to COLLECT a bunch of money from each developer for marketing and then split the profits. The analogy of a "manager or agent" from TFA is NOT appropriate. An agent MIGHT loan some money to an artist for advertising expenses, but they DO take that money back out of the artist's cut.
Third, TFA's quote: "...developers a flat fee in exchange for an unlimited number of licenses tilt grossly in the favor of the MacHeist team" is OBVIOUSLY wrong. _Perhaps_ the AMOUNT of the flat fee was too low... But $1,000,000 would still be a flat fee, and no one is claiming that would've been unfair to the developers. This deal is structured how it should be: The developers have no differential say in the success or failure of the sales numbers. Their contribution is static (existing software) and unchanging. But everyone wants MacHeist to have a strong incentive to sell a lot of copies. SO MacHeist should get the vast majority of the value from the Nth copy sold as N approaches a high number, to make them make maximum marketing effort to get to high numbers.
Entire TFA is based on the idea that MacHeist being really successful makes them evil. Profitable marketing and distribution engines without heavy developer investment are EXACTLY what shareware needs. The more profit they can make without costing the devs, the better.
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Same here. I just bought the bundle. I can honestly say that I would probably never have purchased any of these apps at their individual prices, but couldn't resist the thought of getting all of them for $49. So far I've only tried Disco. The smoke rising off of the window as it burns CDs is a total gimmick, but really darn cool nonetheless.
english is my first language, but my only formal education in it was from U.S. public schools, so you may forgive me for
Business as usual. get over it.
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SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
We don't speak out against MacHeist because they're not treating paying customers like criminals.
/. zen: Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Beowulf clusters...
Also, with software there are a LOT of costs in QA and support that simply don't exist for music. I'm sure there is someone somewhere that you can call that will tell you which side of the CD goes down in the CD player but for the most part once a disk is sold, the RIAA is done with it (unless you try to copy it...).
I would venture to say that software companies have significantly higher costs than the RIAA, at least in those regions where they havnt forced themselves to have higher costs (such as paying people to play your music, paying lawyers to sue your fans, etc).
Bottles.
Their crime was to take on upfront risk against a potentional profit - and succeeding.
QA and support don't apply here - these apps already exist, have already been in distribution, and have already won awards and whatnot. Any support and/or QA issues are the sole responsibility of the developer- the one getting only 25%. It's not like MacHeist has any distribution costs, either, as the software is downloaded, and licenses are acquired through email.
I'm fine with business is business, as long as it is represented honestly.
The MacHeist folks were pushing this bundle as being much more beneficial to the independent developers than it really was. Case in point, several folks have said "Hey, I wouldn't normally buy this -- so they got an extra sale from me and I feel better about supporting the developer." The reality is that independent developer got maybe a $1 (if they're lucky) from the guy and can only pray that they won't have to answer a single support call.
While I don't agree with the terms of the bundle (and would decline the offer myself), I don't have an issue with them making the deal. I *DO* have an issue with them marketing it as benefiting the small independent developers. If they would have left that out -- I think it wouldn't be the issue that it currently is in the community.
Business is business and being dishonest about your motives is being dishonest about your motives. But of course, the whole point of their "Week of the Independent Developer" was to take advantage of the belief that buying this bundle was a way to support the efforts of the developers involved. The facts thus far seem to question whether this is actually the case.
It's not unlike a charity that claims to help some disadvantaged kids/group and it turns out only 5% or less of the contributions ever makes it to those kids/group. Would you be as willing to partake in that charity if you knew that 95% of it went to pay for lofty salaries, corporate perks, and what not?