For Mac Developers, Armageddon Comes Tomorrow

kdawson writes "David Gewirtz's blog post over at ZDNet warns of an imminent price collapse for traditional Mac applications, starting tomorrow when the Mac App Store opens. The larger questions: what will Mac price plunges of 90%-95% mean for the PC software market? For the Mac's market share? Quoting: 'The Mac software market is about as old-school as you get. Developers have been creating, shipping, and selling products through traditional channels and at traditional price points for decades. ... Mac software has historically been priced on a parity with other desktop software. That means small products are about $20. Utilities run in the $50-60 range. Games in the $50 range. Productivity packages and creative tools in the hundreds, and specialty software — well, the sky's the limit. Tomorrow, the sky will fall. Tomorrow, the iOS developers move in and the traditional Mac developers better stick their heads between their legs and kiss those price points goodbye.'"

Comments

Re:Price vs volume

[gstoddart]

Software is simply overpriced, vendors have been getting away with charging ridiculous amounts for years because they're greedy. Software sales are 99% profit

Horseshit. Pure horseshit.

Having worked as a professional developer for 13 years before my current job, unless you have a stable codebase which nobody is changing, you have expenses for developers, QA, documentation and tech writers, sales, marketing ... plus you have to pay the accountants, lawyers, admin staff, IT staff, office costs, and executive bonuses.

There is no freaking way that software sales are 99% profit -- nowhere close. Building commercial software is an expensive, and resource intensive task. Anybody saying otherwise has likely never done it.

Just because some people can afford to/are willing to give away their labors for free (and I'm certainly a fan of free software) doesn't mean there isn't a cost associated with it. These people are either doing it because it's fun, or because they're students. In either case, they still need to pay their bills and couldn't afford to write free software if they weren't getting paid from something else (or had nothing better to do with their time).