My name is Kenneth and I write cool Mac and iPhone software. This is my personal weblog where I post about stuff I find interesting. I usually write about Mac development, the business of shareware and the Mac community in general.
read more →If you read these lines, then you probably already know something has been going on in the mac community. I am, of course, talking about MacHeist.
Well-know bloggers and developers have been going on and on and on and on and on and on about how this sucks. Most have some points, but are completely out of proportion and full of hate (or is it jealousy?).
Now, let’s examine the situation objectively. MacHeist have been selling a software bundle worth more than $300 for 50$. 25% of the profit goes to charity. Participating developers get a flat fee and MH gets most of the money.
There are five groups of people involved in this: The MacHeist team, the buyers, charity, participating developers and non-participating developers.
- MacHeist. Wow! they get an estimated $400k – win
- Buyers. They get more than 300$ worth of software for less than 50$ – win
- Charity. They get $200k they would never have gotten otherwise – win
- Participating developers. They get an estimated $10k to $30k PLUS they spread the word and expose their products to tens of thousands of potential customers they would never have been able to reach otherwise. Basically it’s like getting paid for advertising you own products – win
- Non-participating developers. The last group are the developers who (like me) either were not offered the opportunity to become involved in MacHeist or who turned it down. Yet those developers still benefit from MacHeist. This event brought huge amounts of attention to mac shareware. Lots of people realized what shareware has to offer and started buying shareware – win
Right, everyone wins. I don’t see the problem. What the heck is everyone complaining about??? MacHeist team get the biggest share of the profit… so what? They did their job, and did it well.
As a message to anyone that thinks Phill is just a nerd kid that sits back in front of his computer, does nothing and enjoys getting rich; You, try and do the same. Good luck, you will need it.
A few other interesting takes on the matter:
- Marketing Irony by Wil Shipley
- The Impact of MacHeist by Scott Stevenson
- Taking the Heist by Olivier Breidenbach
This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Business, English, Internet, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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