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by vladk 5637 days ago
I'm not following your point. Are you saying having a curated store is what causes you to buy more apps? So what specifically drives the increased purchases? Ability to easily discover more apps? Lack of free alternatives? Low pricepoints?

The reason my purchases on the Mac/PC side are fairly low is the amount of free programs that fit my needs (and do it well). Whenever the best app was not free I bought it (Disco, Transmit, come to mind).
1 comments
ghshephard 5637 days ago
Apologies - I should have been more explicit. The point is that I am the type of individual who has the means, and desire, to purchase applications and show my appreciation to the developers that create them; I have done this on the IOS platforms (iPhone/iPad) - but I have NOT done this on the OS X platform - despite using that platform as much, or more, than my iPad/iPhone, and despite there usually being somewhere, a PayPal funding button for those more popular Apps.

Some other thoughts:

  o Once there is a curated environment that offers
    low friction, and reasonable prices for applications, 
    I will buy them for OS X.

  o Even though there will be $10 VNC apps on the MacStore 
    I will still  pay $119 for Microsoft Office.  

  o Finally, (and not stated) - I am looking forward to 
    paying through the MacStore for tools like VLC, 
    Colloquy, etc...
As to _why_ - I'm not really sure. It might be the desire to believe that I'm not the only chump clicking on the Paypal button (Though, rationally, if my desire is to reward developers, that shouldn't play any role). It might be the convenience of having the curated store track, and filter out the nefarious malware (Though, once again, google, plus only choosing the popular software out there, is a good substitute for that). It might be the belief that I have some control over what is installed on my laptop (though, ps -ef, launchtl list, netstat -an, and find / -cmin -3 after an install usually gives me a pretty good hint)

All I know is that this time, next year, I expect to have purchased about $600 worth of OS X software from the Mac Store, which is about $500 more, on average, than I have in the last 10 years for OS X.

I may be a couple standard deviations away from the mean, but I don't think I'm three.

Net-Net - I believe the MacStore is going to be great for Mac Developers, and will result in significantly more income flooding into that software channel, without wiping out the higher end products. I disagree with the posted article's hypothesis.

Let's check back in a year and see who ends up being correct.

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