Apple vs Android in the Enterprise

Chipp Walters chipp at chipp.com
Thu Sep 15 22:32:19 EDT 2011


On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:52 PM, Richard Gaskin
<ambassador at fourthworld.com>wrote:

>
> Maybe.  Personally I think piracy is overrated in terms of sales impact.
>

 Perhaps. But in the case of mobile phones, not so fast. Here's why.

As commercial developers, we all pretty much know our job is to deter the
casual pirate-- the one who just 'borrows' a copy from their buddy. That's
the guy we don't want stealing our product, because he MAY purchase it. IOW,
you may have *just lost a sale.*

On the other hand, those who are professional hackerCrackers, and those who
follow them on BitTorrent, etc-- they WILL STEAL your product, but they will
almost NEVER buy your product. No sale lost there.

Now, I know you don't own an iPhone, but I can tell you I've spent WAY more
money on apps than on the damn phone. And the majority of these apps are
just to try them out. Rarely-- RARELY are they up to snuff and provide me
any real actual value. I'd say for every app I purchase that I like, I have
ten more purchased which are just plain junk, or I have no need for. Just
like the price, the bar is set really low compared to desktop software. In
fact, I've even tried asking authors to please charge more so they can
develop more and better features!

(Disclosure: I don't count games among these apps as I'm not a game player
and only download Scott Rossi's games just to marvel at his creativity!)

Fact is, this system of selling apps for $0.99 is, IMO, broke. We all know
only the top 100 apps of the available 1M (0.1%) actually make enough money
to live on. Furthermore, it's pretty much impossible to find what you want
in the AppStore as Apple only shows you what they want you to buy.

I guess I'm a bit more of a capitalist, and rather let the free market
decide rather than have Apple anoint the winners and losers.

Anyway, getting back to the main point-- because you really can't try before
you buy (most apps, not all apps), and there's no refund policy, Apple
forces people to purchase even the crappy stuff. So, of course there's zero
piracy in a closed system like this, but in an open system, like Android,
developers are forced to actually create decent software before someone will
pay for it.

And of course we all know how to create software which the casual user won't
steal ;-)



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