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Craig Miller (USA) posted the message to the group:
The Touchpad firestorm sale that HP has started has also caused an unseen consequence on their software sales. From reading the posts at PreCentral, there is more traffic on their site and software then ever before. In the article: "The accidental userbase", software developers are seeing as much as 70% more sales!
But lets look at this for a second, we all know these sales are because the Touchpad is $100.00 right now (16BG model), instead of $499.00 where it first started. You cannot find one really, if there is a store that has one, they will be gone in ten minutes. This is telling me people wanted the Touchpad but the price point was too high.
But what will happen in two weeks after all the Touchpads are gone and all the new users have had their full of apps? No one knows actually, but what happens if in two months people are still buying programs? Does this mean there is a base of active users that are growing the WebOS environment? I believe it does.
This got me thinking then, what would happen if Mensys sold eCS for $25.00 a copy? If anyone of you read OSNews days after eCS 2.0 was announced, many, many people were interested in buying the OS, but not for $127.00. I can't blame them actually, I look at it this way, I like the Haiku OS but I would never buy it for $127.00, actually not for $50.00. Not because I am not interested, but the value is hard to justify if you are going to use it as a hobby OS. Now for $25.00, that makes me pause for a few minutes and possibly buy it, this is because anything at $25.00 or lower can be considered an impulse buy with no or almost no buyers remorse.
What if though, Mensys, tried this out, possibly making a version 2.5 of eCS and testing out the waters with $25.00 per copy, and you only get one copy, not 5 copies like now?
So the math would be that every five people would equal one sale. Normally, you don't want this, if you can sell one product of $127.00 and deal with one person, you surely want to do this over $25.00 for five people and have to deal with five...well people. But with eCS this is different, because we are trying to grow the user-base, because this will be the only way our community can survive in the long run.
And what if it works? Let's say it grows the eCS user base by a factor of five. This would be huge and possible unrealistic, but if it did, then new people are using, buying, programming, and telling others. Even Mensys can slowly bring the up afterwords (version 3.0) after "hooking" all these people with new updates they don't want to be without. Things can start moving, programmers can make money, eCS can get more software, the circle is renewed.
It's just a thought, since I see this with the WebOS right now. What are your thoughts? I have also posted this on the Bluenexus (www.bluenexus.net) site.
Craig Miller, www.bluenexus.net
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