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Observations on the Mac App Store

On January 6, 2011, In marketing, technology, by Anand Rajaram

Like any i-fanboi, I spent a few precious hours on the Mac App Store (and ironically mostly looking at Productivity and Business Category of Apps !). Here are my observations :

The Good

  • Thank God, the App Store is a separate app and wasn’t made part of the bloated, crumbling-under-its-own-weight, cant-get-any-more-clunky iTunes. It maintains the iTunes App Store experience.
  • Most likely to jumpstart the store, products that were sold as bundles (iWork, iLife etc,.) can now be bought individually (Yay! I can buy iPhoto without having to pay for GarageBand too), and buying everything in the bundle is still cheaper than buying the CD version before. This could also be because Apple can now enforce licenses more strictly (as opposed to the CD world where anyone can share willy-nilly). The CD version probably had a premium built in for piracy that is not there anymore.
  • Apps already installed but not bought from the App Store are recognized as being installed (Although, apparently they cannot be upgraded from within the App Storealready-bought-1.png
  • Good for Apple, it is so easy to buy apps. (see the third items under “The Bad” too)

The Bad

  • No easy way to pay just for upgrades (you got to buy new)
  • No trials and beta. This is a big deal. I have bought so many pieces of software for my Mac and not ONE of them did I buy without trying it out first. I hope there is a way around this.
  • Bad (for me!), it is so easy to buy Apps. I just accidentally bought one yesterday (for nearly 15 bucks!) . I have done this a couple of items in iOS, but there is a pretty big difference between 99 cents and 15 bucks!
  • So I figured, I could contact Customer Service and was surprised to find a nice link from the FAQ. The bad news is that the link was broken. This was a bit surprising, given Jobs’ famous attention to detail, but hopefully this will get addressed soon. Apple - Page Not Found.pngUpdate : This seems to have been fixed by now)
  • App store review and HIG still don’t seem to stop people from creating crappy apps

The Promise

  • No matter what, this is going to be one monstrous distribution channel. Evernote, an app that is already pretty successful by many measure, reported a 1800% increase in new users. If an already successful app is seeing this, I can only imagine the goodness it will bring to apps and startups looking for a nice distribution channel.
  • Kudos to Apple for continuously learning across its product eco-systems and adding good business models around long-standing technical innovations (Yum, RPM  are all app stores, if you think about it.)

There are still a lot of unknowns (in-app purchases, subscriptions) and lot of things to be improved, but this is a good start, and hope it heads in the right direction.

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3-part series on Qualitative and Quantitative tests to improve conversion

On October 15, 2010, In landing page design, marketing, technology, by Anand Rajaram

Of the different hats I wear at OfficeDrop, one that I especially relish is in our website design, messaging and poring through funnels (second only to “getting out of the building”). It combines various areas that I am passionate about, including web design, data geeking, copywriting and video editing.

I am thrilled that I am writing a 3-part series on Optimizing conversion rates using Qualitative and Quantitative Tests at the Performable blog . What makes this even awesome-r for me, is that the company was co-founded by David Cancel, one of the rockstars in the Boston Entrepreneurial scene. I have learned a lot of my ghettopreneur habits (such as Fake it before you make it) by attending David’s talks in the area (including my personal favorite on Data Driven Startups at a recent LeanStartups meetup). We learned a lot of valuable lessons in the process of re-designing and re-branding OfficeDrop and I am glad to have the opportunity to share it with the community.

There was a lot of great content, and some posts are pretty detailed and lengthy. Be sure to read them all, I promise it will be worth it. Special Thanks to Healy Jones for his editorial inputs.

Read Part 1 of this series

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RIP Google Wave – 3 Reasons why the experiment failed

On August 4, 2010, In customer development, Lessons Learned, Product Development, technology, by Anand Rajaram

So everyone is talking about Google ditching Wave as a standalone product. Here are my three cents on why the experiment failed:

RIP Wave.jpg

It wasn’t viral enough

Invite-only alpha for a “Communications” product is an oxymoron. Seriously, Google? I can picture this conversation happening in Google HQ, circa April 2009, a month before Launch, as the buzz was building up for Bing.

“Microsoft is launching Bing in a month’s time. We need something to steal the thunder. Are there any cool projects we can show-off”

“Yes, there is this thing called Wave. It is a totally cool way of communicating. Think Gmail, Twitter, Skype, Flickr and Google Talk in one”

“Cool. Let’s launch it”

“But it is not quite ready for prime-time”

“That is easy. Let us put an alpha label on it, make it invite-based. It worked out very well for Gmail”.

“sounds good”

Except it is not. This is a new way to communicate. Instead of making the invite a rare commodity (apparently some were sold in eBay, make it viral!) I got an invite relatively soon, but it was useless, since no one else from my social graph had one!

Too Radical and too complex : Even when people communicated, they just didn’t get it

And because they didn’t get it, they didn’t use it. Here is a screen-capture of a Wave between me and my friend. I consider both of us as early adopters of technology.

Not quite realtime GoogleWave

Obviously not “real-time” conversations! People aren’t using the system, you are not learning enough and you are creating artificial scarcity?

Big-bang launches and radical ideas usually don’t mix well.

Now imagine, if they had resisted the temptation of the big-bang launch, but did it more organically. They could have introduced Google Wave to Businesses First, so that you start with a critical mass of people collaborating from day one. They could then have incorporated aspects of it as part of Google Docs and ofcourse, Gmail. This way, you are also teaching people aspects of the new paradigm. This is clearly not as sexy as the Big bang launch, and clearly takes more time. But this would have significantly increased the chances of success. They should have done “Learn-Measure-Build”. In some ways, I think it was just “bad karma”. Everything about Wave’s launch went against Google’s “Dont be evil” philosophy. Between the urge to steal Microsoft’s thunder and seeing how well big bang launches are working for Apple, somewhere along the way, Google lost what it really stands for.

RIP, Google Wave. You were a good experiment that taught a lot to people outside Google as much as you taught Google. I think that is a lot more than what I can say for Buzz.

*Picture from Flickr, thanks to rjzii”

 

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EC2 Spot instance pricing trends

On December 16, 2009, In technology, by Anand Rajaram

I mentioned in my earlier post that it would be interesting to compare prices between spot prices and traditional instance prices. The data is already available at http://cloudexchange.org/charts/us-east-1.linux.m1.small.html and it looks like spot prices are waaayy lower than traditional prices.

Stay tuned and it is going to be interesting how this pans out.

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The Cloud got a bit more elastic – Amazon EC2 Spot instances

On December 14, 2009, In technology, by Anand Rajaram

At the Xconomy Cloud^3 conference and unpanel last week, there was a lot of great discussion around the Cloud’s cost economics and at what point the Cloud becomes more expensive than a in-house data center. As part of the unpanel discussion, I had mentioned that cost models will continue to evolve in the cloud and that we are in the very early stages.

And here it is, the Amazon Ec2 Spot pricing. The concept is seemingly straightforward (with a somewhat unexpected twist). You can bid for “Spot Instances” where you specify the price you are willing to pay for an EC2 instance. To quote the AWS blog “As requests come in and unused capacity becomes available, we’ll evaluate the open bids for each Region and compute a new Spot Price for each instance type”. And here is the twist. After that we’ll terminate any Spot Instances with bids below the Spot Price, and launch instances for requests with bids higher than or at the new Spot Price. The instances will be billed at the then-current Spot Price regardless of the actual bid. I don’t know why the instances would have to be terminated, rather than a simple re-calculation of the price of running the instance, but this seems like a fun experiment.

To be able to fully take advantage of this kind of flexibility being offered, your application (actually I should background jobs) would have to be totally stateless and be able to resume from any where in a workflow. Queuing mechanisms such as SQS come in handy. Like I mentioned in my talk, it is probably good design anyway to be stateless. And of course, please don’t run your web server or user-facing applications in a Spot instance. That is a guaranteed way to get fired.

All in all, I think this is more of a pricing experiment from Amazon’s perspective, more than anything else. Getting every additional dollar out of your excess capacity is a centuries old problem (think free business cards from VistaPrint), and I’d be interested in knowing how this pans out for Amazon and how Spot prices compare to traditional prices.

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