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Microsoft Hopes Money Will Entice More Developers (engadget.com)
At Build conference, Microsoft announced that starting later this year, all consumer apps (except games) sold in the Microsoft Store will ship a whopping 95 percent of the revenue earned from app and in-app purchases to the developer. From a report: That is, if the customer purchases the app via a deep or direct link. If the customer gets your app via a Microsoft-assisted method, like getting featured on the Microsoft Store, then devs will get 85 percent of the revenue, which is still a pretty good amount.
Software developers need to eat, and Microsoft's 95% revenue share will benefit thousands of small developers along with the larger companies. The notion that only free software is good software is myopic at best; the open source work I've done has only been possible because I earn a good salary from a commercial software company.
Lets say that the total cost of developing my app is 70 currency units - 5 programmers worked on it, I had to pay them and myself a salary for 2 years. And the app then sells for 100 currency units on the Microsoft Store - that is the equilibrium price for this app - giving me 30 currency units max profit per sale. If Microsoft then takes 15 currency units from that "for use of the app store", I am left with 50% or "half" of the profit I would have made per unit sold without use of the store. Depending on how many units I sell at 100 units a pop, that may be hundreds of thousands of Dollars or millions of Dollars Microsoft took from me, or more, for the simple privilege of using their "Store Cloud". Does that make economic sense? Giving up a whopping 50% of the potential profit margin for an app to MS, for a little product page on their App store?
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
throwing effort at a money train that left the station 6 years ago with Steve Jobs as its conductor is a classic microsoft blunder. Steam is for games, google is for word processing, Chrome is for browsing...what are you for again?
pack it in and put the paddles on your cloud platform while you still have a chance to compete with it...and for god sakes stop asking cloud customers for feature suggestions you just come across as desperate and directionless as always.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Money? Entice developers? That's crazy talk!!
We prefer sensitivity training and 30 page codes of conduct, my fried :)
Lets say that the total cost of developing my app is 70 currency units - 5 programmers worked on it, I had to pay them and myself a salary for 2 years. And the app then sells for 100 currency units
Well there's your problem right there. If you really wanted 30 units of profit you should have charged 115 units for it on the App Store (well really a little more but you get the gist).
It's not like expenditure and profit are not intertwined; you could also have reduced costs of production by buying crappy paddles for your ping-pong table.
But 15 units of profit is STILL A PROFIT. And 15% of some much, much larger number is still in absolute terms much larger than 30% of a much smaller number...
Does that make economic sense? Giving up a whopping 50% of the potential profit margin for an app to MS, for a little product page on their App store?
When the "little product page" enables millions of people literally one click away from purchase (because they have registered payment methods) to see your product, then HELL YES that makes sense because you have an order of magnitude (or more) chance of a sale.
You seem to have forgotten how hard it is to sell software to real people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I see Microsoft more like the Cool kid from high school, who became a looser when he grew up. Who actively is trying to relive their glory days.
But those Apple and Google Nerds, ended up on top, and now they are trying to fit in again.
The App store idea is more or less opposed to the core Microsoft main selling point. "We have all the software you could possible want to run it" By having a Microsoft store, it is cutting into that idea, because they are trying to say, we only want you to use the approved Microsoft products.
In general the App Store isn't a bad idea. Even Linux with APT and Snap is a similar process where software shown to be "safe","works", and "worth while" is posted on the store, giving you a safe place to get your software. However the issue has been, is what each store owner considers safe, works and worth while, is a crap shoot.
Lets say I build a better copy and paste feature for Windows. Microsoft may reject it because it overrides a windows built in functionality, thus considered unsafe, or they will have those features in the next version of Windows (probably after seeing what I did in my program) and reject it as not worth while because that feature will be there soon.
The Apple store is notorious for this.
But for most developers they program for windows because they have too, because that is where the customers are, not because of any sense of loyalty to Microsoft. The App store for Microsoft vs. Selling by yourself, or on amazon.... Is just too cumbersome. While 15% is a bit high. However the biggest expense is the uncertainty.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
who became a looser
As opposed to becoming a tighter?
Microsoft developers managed to eat for about four decades just by making software people wanted to buy and platforms that were easy to develop for, without taking any cut of the revenues from other software running on their platform.
In a world where so much everyday stuff is now done with mobile and web apps, any barrier to writing or distributing Windows-friendly desktop applications seems like a bad idea for Microsoft. I'm not sure it matters whether it's 15% or 5%. It's not 0%.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
But what if that is 100% of $0.00 because nobody knows about your app?
So this 95% offer is competing not with Android/iOS but with a tradition where (on Windows and every other desktop OS) developers have always been able to keep 100%. Not hard to see why developers aren't jumping at the opportunity.
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It seems like the classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" philosophy of Microsoft. I see the plan going like this:
1) Get developers used to publishing their applications to the Microsoft store by giving them generous incentives and "free" marketing.
2) Make it more difficult to download applications outside of the store on "security" grounds. We're already seeing this with mandatory driver and recommended application signing in Windows 10.
3) Once you got them locked in, raise Microsoft's cut of the revenue back to 30% like Apple does.
Hell, I wouldn't put it past them to start discounting popular applications below MSRP just to get more people using the Microsoft store as well. Is Steam getting too much marketshare? Take their top 20 titles and offer them on the Microsoft Store for $10 less.
It's closer to the Mac app store, but even then Windows has a vastly larger and more diverse software ecosystem.
That is unlikely. Sure you find Windows software that has no Mac version and vice versa.
But on my Mac I can run basically all Mac software, obviously, and all linux software. Sure you could argue that most linux software (especially with the new Linux sup-operation-system in Windows 10) also can be made running in Windows.
In the end a typical user only runs so many programs anyway. So arguing about "the size of the eco system" makes IMHO not much sense.
I write my software in Java (Scala/Groovy) it runs on all Desktop OSes anyway, why would I care for a certain OS or its eco system?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
And they wonder why they're hemorrhaging customers? You didn't have to pay to publish apps before the app store.
Only eleven mentions of Microsoft on the front-page :]
15% is high? You came to that conclusion how?
Apple takes a 30% cut
Google takes a 30% cut
Amazon takes a 30% cut
Steam takes a 30% cut
Seems to me that the MS store is the best deal in town...
is a niche market filled with bad desktop apps no one wants.
Be or ben't
A new era in Hollywood Accounting, that is.
If the folks (collectively; obviously you can have more than 1 coder on a project) that actually write the code get 1% of gross for longer than the time it takes for Microsoft to gain control of the project I'd be stunned.
Heck, I'd be surprised if it happened at all. Maybe to one or two "loss leader" projects so they MS can trot those out and say "You, too can become rich selling magazine subscriptions in your free time and summers".
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I have no XBox, so I have to ask... hey, wait, I remember something, from when my Laptop with Win10 arrived and I removed a bunch of preinstalled junk... I think I remember something like this flying off the SSD with a bunch of other useless crap, could that be it?
What is it for?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They're all high. These guys add extremely small value, but want to extract huge amounts of profits. But this is the PC, we shouldn't even HAVE an apps market there! No one on OSX really uses Apple Store except to get xcode, because you can get everything you need elsewhere. What works on a phone for social media shouldn't automatically mean it's a good idea on an actual work device.
If you were Big Bruno's boyfriend you'd also be pretty loose by now.