“Leave it to a company as cocky as Microsoft to dictate prices in a sector over which it has no control,” Rick Aristotle Munarriz writes for The Motley Fool.
“The software giant wants mobile software developers to forget the $0.99 price point that Apple’s App Store is championing, as it gears up for the fall launch of its Windows Marketplace for Mobile,” Munarriz writes.
MacDailyNews Take: Is Apple’s App Store really “championing” the 99-cent price point or did prices just gravitate to that base point? Plenty of apps are free (like ours) and plenty of others cost – and are worth – more than 99-cents, too. Apple provides the App Store, the developers set their own prices.
Munarriz continues, “‘You make more money selling applications than selling your application in a dollar store,’ Loke Uei Tan — a member of Microsoft’s Mobile Developer Experience team — told developers this week. ‘Ninety-nine cents? Come on. I think your app is worth more than that.’ He may be right, but that doesn’t matter.”
“Kidding developers about the notion of jacking up prices is preposterous,” Munarriz writes. “Microsoft may not see what it likes when it peers into Apple’s App Store, but it’s really only looking at the grim reality of software pricing’s future.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Since Apple makes the bulk of their money on hardware, they can continue to drive down software prices (look at what they did to MSFT on OS pricing) until Microsoft’s look even more outrageous than they do now (if that’s even possible). Microsoft will never be able to make up that loss with mice and obscenely faulty Xbox units (Xbox 360 failure rate is 54.2%). Apple’s turning Microsoft’s gold into lead.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]