[matt_m]

There's a lot of negativity around recurring payments but I'm excited about this model both as a developer and a consumer particularly on iPad. There's been a race to the bottom in pricing in mobile app stores, where a one-time payment equivalent to a cup of coffee can be seen as too expensive for an app costing tens of thousands of dollars (or more) in engineer time to make / support. Maybe as a result of this there's no shortage of micropayment or advertising based mobile games but the productivity space is not very competitive with Mac/PC where people don't blink at paying 10x that cost up front.

If this can establish a middle ground where more app categories can find a sustainable business model including long term support and updates that could be very interesting, especially now that many apps might want to include cloud-based features where committing to support forever in exchange for a one-time payment might be a risky proposition.