Stephen Lopez
Alright. This has been bugging me for a few weeks now. Frankly, I don’t use either of these pieces of software so I don’t really have a horse in the race, I’m just extremely confused.
I’m not a programmer/software engineer, but I can’t imagine that the same amount of work went into writing the code for iA Writer than did the code for Pages. I know. I know. It’s not fair to compare them. Oranges and Apples. Different resources, vastly different sales volume & demand, etc. Completely different playing fields.
But seriously? $20 for an app that is basically a scaled down version of TextEdit vs $20 for an app that is a genuinely good word processor and page layout tool? Can anyone explain to me how that makes any sense?
I’m sure the iA Writer people are talented and great at what they do and deserve every penny that they are charging, and I admit, I’m a cheap-ass son of a bitch… but… seriously? $20?
All I’d be able to think about while enjoying it’s distraction-free writing environment is how I just paid $20 for something that does 1/1,000 of an app that comes pre-installed on my system. I’d be so distracted by the $20 hole in my iTunes account that I’d never even get a chance to see that fancy blur-out-your-last-sentence effect.
Anyway. Ignore me. I’m a bang-for-the-buck kind of guy. I just don’t get software pricing.
iA is a small group, compared to Apple. They provide a niche product, and have to charge enough for it to make profit. The same thing happens everywhere. If I make a game that only 10,000 people will want to buy/play, then I need to charge more for it than a game that millions of people will play. Now, there are exceptions to the rule, because
mostall corporations are made of money-grabbing greedy bastards who think that $100 is a good price for an operating system, or $800 is a fine price for a piece of photomanipulation software.
I figured someone would bring up this argument, but I don’t think the size of the company has anything to do with how much they should charge for their product.
For example, let’s look at The Incident. It sells for a mere 99 cents. It was conceived, designed, and engineered by only two guys - and I won’t believe anyone that tries to tell me that more time was spent programming iA Writer than The Incident. Each of the falling objects in The Incident was drawn, pixel-by-pixel, by hand. Hours upon hours of painstaking work, and that’s just the stuff we see. How can a two-man operation afford to sell their product for 99 cents? Have they devalued themselves by pricing their game so low? I don’t think so. I think they understand that selling 100,000 copies at $1 is better than selling ~5000 copies at $20, because that’s an additional 95,000 happy customers that will sing the praises of their product and maybe even support them in the future.
