Re: [Seriously OT]Mac.com 60 days and counting
Re: [Seriously OT]Mac.com 60 days and counting
- Subject: Re: [Seriously OT]Mac.com 60 days and counting
- From: Bill Cheeseman <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 06:59:36 -0400
on 02-07-18 1:22 AM, James DiPalma at email@hidden wrote:
>
Is it impossible to have an on-topic discussion about leveraging iDisk
>
as a developer?
>
>
Every product and service that Apple develops costs money to develop.
>
Some of these products we get for free: iPhoto, iTunes, <snip>....
>
>
Free products and services help Apple sell computers and increase
>
customer loyalty; we all benefit.
My initial response was too narrow. Sorry. You raise some interesting ideas.
There is still cause for concern about the longevity of promotional
offerings. As we've all seen, when times are good, free promos are easy to
justify to the company's CEO -- they generate additional revenue in excess
of their cost. But when times are bad, the free promos begin to look like
costly giveaways, and the CEO tends to turn them into profit centers: make
money or die. That may not be completely logical (because promos still sell
product, though perhaps at a lower margin), but it's a fact of executive
life.
So, my point is only this. If you plan to design your business around a free
third-party service or product, your long range plans should include the
likelihood that it won't remain free forever.
That said, if you can make a good business model out of it, go for it. If
.Mac is now an Apple profit center, any business you set up that generates
more traffic to .Mac will increase the likelihood that .Mac will survive.
(OT: My personal bugaboo is the fact that Apple apparently treats Cocoa
developer training as a profit center. I won't pay a few thousand dollars to
go to Cupertino for advanced Cocoa instruction, but I sure would go to a
free (or cheap) course within a few hours' drive of my home. And Apple would
profit from my and others' increased ability to write good apps for the
platform.)
--
Bill Cheeseman - email@hidden
Quechee Software, Quechee, Vermont, USA
http://www.quecheesoftware.com
The AppleScript Sourcebook -
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Vermont Recipes -
http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/VermontRecipes
Croquet Club of Vermont -
http://members.valley.net/croquetvermont
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