CrisB wrote:Patrick J wrote:Personally I suspect that if you buy Nisus Writer Pro from the App Store and leave a positive review then you are doing Nisus more good than buying it direct from them.
There's indeed value in positive reviews, but drshan did not mention leaving positive reiews - that was reh-im-mond. Drshan was just interested in time savings etc for himself only, and to hell with the consequences for Nisus. Very, very short-sighted, I wonder if he'd be as keen if his own customers took the same approach...
I think that reviews, positive or negative, are likely a comparatively minor issue overall where the App Store is concerned. The simple fact is many many more people are exposed to and can buy software from the app store than ever found products like Nisus and other 3rd party apps in the past. Installation is simpler and much more reliable than the mess of different schemes used by software vendors for the last 30+ years, so more people can buy software with ease and confidence. (There are several times the number Mac apps available today thanks to the Mac App Store, the whole Mac ecosystem has benefited hugely from it.) It isn't just better for
me, it's better for everybody, users and software developers alike.
Thanks to the App Store the small software vendor no longer has to pay for and manage a sales website, payment facilities, etc. -- all they need now is a support facility of some sort. That can save them a fortune and make it easier for small developers to sell their software. The potential to greatly increase the sales of your software while greatly reducing the time and cost involved in marketing and making it available to customers is a net benefit, not a cost. And nobody is forced to use it, if the nature of a developer's software is such that the App Store is not a suitable vehicle then they are free to continue to do things the traditional way. Apple have gone out of their way to ensure application development for the Mac is as open as it's always been, but that security and ease of use are improved for their customers too.
The obvious success and real benefits for customers, developers and vendors alike of the app store model is why everyone is getting in on the app store thing -- Microsoft, Google, Amazon have all seen how much it can encourage development of apps for their platforms and encourage people to buy new software for their devices. Everyone benefits from that -- the platform vendors certainly, but also the app developers. There are more people developing more apps for more platforms today than ever before, and much of that is due to the simplification and ease of use introduced by the app store model Apple pioneered. I just upgraded two Windows systems to 8.1 and it was very noticeable how much more like the Apple App Store the process was, and how much easier and more straightforward it was, than when I went from Win 7 to 8 a couple of years before. As so often in the past, once Apple pioneer something everyone else suddenly copies it because it's so obviously a better way of doing things.
The App Store approach is not perfect, but it doesn't have to be, it just has to be significantly better than the old method of selling application software, and it is clearly that.
Still banging on about the death of Rosetta? You can't be serious! Apple supported Rosetta for
years before dropping it, anyone who didn't take both the hint and the opportunity to get off that old PPC code before that time was living in a fantasy world of magic ponies, 640K RAM and parallel ports. Technological change: if you can't cope with it then get out of the way because it's going to run you down if you stay there.