Rogue Amoeba - Under The Microscope

What A Free NetNewsWire Means

Wed, 09 Jan 2008

While I was organizing the 2007 MacSanta promo, I put a call out to Brent Simmons, of NetNewsWire fame. Brent was interested, but needed to check it out with the higher-ups at NewsGator (owners of NetNewsWire). Ultimately he couldn't join in, citing reasons that were "quite good and non-evil", prompting me to query:

Alrighty, no worries. Is NNW about to become freeware? 8)

Brent dissuaded me from these ideas, but just over a month later NetNewsWire is indeed freeware, along with all of NewsGator's consumer level RSS clients. Brent and I talked briefly about it¹ and I'm happy for him. This move means his software will be even more widely disseminated than it has been to this point. In the short term, this is also good for users - we already had a great solution for RSS reading, and now it's free.

There's are a couple of fairly large problems though, and I think they must be considered. First, it's a very good bet that a free NetNewsWire has killed the paid RSS reader market on the Mac. Two, in the grand scheme of things, the perceived value of software on the Mac just went down.

The Value Of Software

I'll address this second point first, as I think it's the more important of the two. Unlike physical goods, software has little in the way of built-in value - there's no cost of base materials, no manufacturing cost per unit, and so on. Software is thus worth what the market says it is, instead of the sum of its parts plus a reasonable markup. Developers may set a price, but the market determines if that price is reasonable.

There's certainly a place for free software. But when a fully-featured product such as NetNewsWire is suddenly free, it effectively reduces the value of other for-pay software products. "Why should I have to pay for quality tools, when this quality tool is free?", the thinking goes. When something is given away for free, its perceived value is lowered. If software is treated as valueless, it becomes much, much harder to sell. One need only look at a quote from news coverage discussing the move to freeware to see this in action: "And thank [NewsGator] for this grand gesture...While you're at it, do pray that a few other software companies get inspired by this move and follow suit."

While I understand the sentiment, as someone who makes his living selling software, this is a disheartening thing to read. Yes, it might seem great if all software was free. But while NewsGator has the financial resources to accomplish this move, most companies do not. Very rapidly, you'd see a shrinking of the market, a loss of innovation, and ultimately, a decrease in quality. There's no market for commercial software on Linux, and the quality of solutions simply isn't on par with what's available on the Mac. By attaching a value to software, we give it value, in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

RSS Readers In The Past...

It's also worth considering the impact of this move on the specific market NewNewsWire occupies, RSS readers. NetNewsWire has long been the clear winner on the Mac for RSS readers, but there have been lots of other great clients available. Competing with a great product like NetNewsWire is tough. It's well-made, so the alternatives must be too. It's popular, so it's got a great head start in terms of mindshare. And it was competitively priced, making it hard to compete on price. It's tough, but not impossible to compete with all that. Make a well-designed, reasonably priced product, and you'll have a fighting chance. Excel in one area (customer service, advertising, a specific RSS feature), and you might capture an entire niche. Simply put, when NetNewsWire was for sale, there was a market opening in which to sell competing RSS readers on the Mac.

...The Present...

Now that NetNewsWire is free, that market just got rocked. It may well cease to exist, at least in any viable way for a full-time developer. If competing with a popular, well-designed product is tough, competing with a popular, well-designed product that happens to be free (while remaining fully-funded) is damned near impossible. And that's unfortunate, because ultimately, it's likely to lead to stagnation. The developers at NewsGator have done great work, but the more minds there are attacking a problem in different ways, the more great solutions we see. Look no further than the late nineties, when IE effectively killed Netscape. Web browsers stagnated shortly thereafter - Microsoft, with browser share at or above 90%, had little incentive to innovate, and smaller players just couldn't break in.²

...And The Future

I don't know what will happen from here. I think NetNewsWire will continue to be great for many years to come, and I hope those who worked on paid RSS readers will either be able to continue selling them (a prospect I find unlikely) or move on to more successful projects. Further, Brent's a good friend, and I don't want to come down on him. His hope is that the increased penetration will lead to improved attention data³, saving time for everyone as far as getting us the news we want to read, and things may well play out that way.

Ultimately, however, this strikes me as an overly aggressive move by NewsGator that has (presumably unintentional) negative side effects. If developers are upset when Apple kills a market (iTunes and the MP3 market, Watson v. Sherlock, and many more), can we hold major developers on the Mac OS X platform to any less of a standard?

Footnotes:
1. Brent also explained that he had to misdirect me from my lucky guess, as it was very private knowledge at the time. When he told me he hadn't even told his family, I figured I could forgive him. ↩

2. It's certainly true that we've enjoyed a recent renaissance in browsers, thanks in no small part to Safari on the Mac and Firefox on all platforms. That's far from a guaranteed result, however. ↩

3. Greg Reinacker, of NewsGator, explains attention data quite well:

"And second, we want to collect "attention" data (actually I like to call this activity data, but everyone else in the world calls it attention) and use it to make everyone's experience better. If there is a specific feed you love, and you're constantly emailing its articles to friends or saving articles in your clippings, that's interesting...and if there are a lot of people doing this, it's probably a good indicator about the "relevancy"" of that content for other users. Similar with individual articles that are getting a lot of attention from users. Basically, by using your data, in combination with aggregate data from other users, we can deliver a better experience for everyone. And that's a good thing - both for us and for you."

Excerpted from his aforelinked blog post. ↩

Posted by Paul | Permalink | View/Post Comments (39)

Comments

Rory Prior
Wed Jan 9 20:27:34 2008

Thanks for giving this a mention Paul, I'm one of those RSS reader developers who's likely to see his application's sales dry up as a result of this and I'm not particularly happy about it. I'm just really thankful I diversified my product range a couple of years ago or I'd be getting ready to go out of business right about now. I blogged my thoughts here:

http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/blog/2008/01/scorched-earth.html

Steve Harris
Wed Jan 9 21:01:15 2008

You've put into words a lot of what's been going through my head about this move. I don't know whether the market will dry up completely since there have been decent free RSS readers around for a while (although none as good as NNW) but it can no longer be a worthwhile place for small developers.

I have been trying to find a positive side to this for the likes of Rory, but all I could think of was the consolation prize that the move wasn't intended to damage the Mac market, but rather to help NewsGator compete overall. RSS readers have now gone the way of email clients, which could be quite sad for the future.

Jeremy Pinnix
Wed Jan 9 22:25:39 2008

I understand your concern as a mac software developer, but I don't think the perceived value of all mac software is going to be lessened. Feed readers are a special circumstance.

I was a loyal NetNewsWire user for years. But then I discovered the awesomeness that is Google Reader. It's faster. It is always synchronized. The iPhone version is great. I can easily share posts with my friends. I returned to NNW for 4 months but then went back to Google Reader. When I posted to twitter about this news today, I received so many replies that stated in essence "that's cool, but I like Google Reader now."

The online readers killed the value of the desktop client reader.

There is still plenty of opportunity and need for great desktop apps.

Glenn Fleishman
Wed Jan 9 23:06:54 2008

This is definitely a special and I believe you will be proven over time incorrect that the rest of Mac software's value is degraded.

You write:

"But while NewsGator has the financial resources to accomplish this move, most companies do not."

That's exactly wrong, a remarkable thing for me to say to you, Paul, who are so often exactly right.

This isn't an issue of financial resources. NewsGator has opted based on its particular market strategy to drop per-seat licensing fees for all its client software to increase adoption of its much more valuable server software.

This has the incidental effect of cornering the market for client software (if people like their approach) which leads to people using NewsGator software all the time everywhere when not at work, and then telling their IT people that they should buy the server (if they even know about the server).

This is how Palm got accepted in the enterprise, too.

So it's a weird move in that it's basically a way to drop per-seat licenses in the enterprise and sell tastes of crack in the individual market. Unlike, say, TextWrangler, which was a typically admirably balls-out Rich Siegel move to eviscerate what he saw as lesser text editor competitors to Bare Bones ("You must be this tall to play"), this NewsGator move has nothing to do with the featuresets of other RSS readers.

Dylan
Wed Jan 9 23:31:00 2008

I was a paid user of NNW, but gave up on it some time ago. For me the dealbreaker was that syncing with horribly broken at the time. (I used the .Mac syncing then.) I had NNW on multiple machines and feeds marked read one place ended up unread elsewhere and it was a mess.

I switched to endo (paid for that too, and in the last week or so was made into donation-ware!) and had other sync problems there as well. I went back and forth for a little bit, but ended up using Google Reader (mostly in OmniWeb, paid for that too!) with Reader Notifier/Growl for notifications. When I got the iPhone that solidified Google Reader in my mind and I've been happy with that ever since.

Today I tried the new free NNW and corresponding NewsGtor Mobile on the iPhone, and while nice, I'm not finding much that is better over Google Reader.

While the thoughts here are interesting, I'm curious why Google Reader isn't even mentioned; nor the fact that NNW already had a free Lite version. Or that endo went free first.

Graham Parks
Thu Jan 10 02:50:17 2008

This isn't an issue of financial resources. NewsGator has opted based on its particular market strategy to drop per-seat licensing fees for all its client software to increase adoption of its much more valuable server software.

That's a PR angle, not an argument. Being able to give away your lead product, for any reason, is a question of financial resources, and its effect on the rest is exactly the same.

And Paul, speaking of PR bullshit, I'm shocked you've fallen for Newsgator's PR angle that "attention data" is for users' benefit. Read the Privacy Policy - it's being collected for "advertisers and content partners". Congratulations NNW users, every action you take while reading RSS on your Mac is now being tracked, repackaged and sold to the highest bidder.

Paul (Rogue Amoeba Staff)
Thu Jan 10 05:05:07 2008

Rory: To be sure, this is why it's always good to have more than one product. I'll be interested to learn just what you see in the coming weeks.

Steve Harris: "RSS readers have now gone the way of email clients, which could be quite sad for the future."

I spoke to Brent about all this, and he said much the same thing. His point was that this was already happening, this move might merely have hastened it along. Overall, that doesn't seem like a good thing (I've previously bemoaned the quality of existing email clients), but with free web readers, it may have been inevitable.

Jeremy Pinnix: Feedreaders may be a special circumstance, but I don't know that the average user will see those subtleties. It's another commodity market now, like browsers and email clients. How many of these can we have before users perceive all software in this light? I don't know.

"The online readers killed the value of the desktop client reader."

I have to disagree, at least in part, with this. Brent said much the same thing when we spoke, but I don't think it's happened yet. I still use a desktop reader, as do millions of others. Online readers might have been the true death knell for desktop readers, but this move hastened that death.

Glenn Fleishman:
"This is definitely a special and I believe you will be proven over time incorrect that the rest of Mac software's value is degraded."

I'm not sure how that would ever be proven one way or another 8).

"This isn't an issue of financial resources. NewsGator has opted based on its particular market strategy to drop per-seat licensing fees for all its client software to increase adoption of its much more valuable server software."

I'll have to disagree here, and strongly. It absolutely is an issue of financial resources. NewsGator has the resources to offer a consumer app (a line of them, actually) for free, because they charge for enterprise software (they also have a whole lot of venture capital). The average Mac developer has no enterprise side bringing in money, and certainly no VC. So with that in mind, how is it anything but an issue of resources? NewsGator can give away free consumer software, because they'll make money on enterprise. Other Mac developers simply can't do that.

"this NewsGator move has nothing to do with the featuresets of other RSS readers."

Well, as I said, the negative side effects are presumably unintentional. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be considered, however.

Dylan: Google Reader never really occurred to me, as I don't use it, and this discussion was focused on desktop apps. Yes, web apps will have an impact on desktop apps, and yes, web readers were moving in on desktop readers turf, but it's not a side avenue (that others are invited to explore). As for NNW Lite, it's certainly worth noting, but when it existed, there was always NNW Full. Thus, it was always understand that Lite was "less", and that there were paid solutions out there, both NNW and others. Now that the a fully-featured, tremendously popular reader is free, the market resets itself to an assumption that readers should be free.

Graham Parks: I certainly agree with your statement that "being able to give away your lead product, for any reason, is a question of financial resources"

However, as for the attention data bit, I don't believe I've "fallen" for anything. I said things may well play out that way, and I believe it's possible. I know Brent well, and I'm giving him and NewsGator the benefit of the doubt - he's earned it. If this data is improperly collected, or mis-used, I'll be happy to raise the alarm, but I don't think that's justified yet.

On a side note, I'm impressed at the high level of debate this article has spurred. It seems that all to often, this types of posts do little but illustrate the poor reading comprehension that exists on the web. So, thanks to everyone responding.

Mitch Cohen
Thu Jan 10 07:29:53 2008

In addition to the free readers mentioned above, two behemoths are free - Safari and Firefox. They're not nearly as full-featured as NNW, but for many users they're quite useful. I was perfectly happy using Safari's RSS features until Leopard, when feeds stopped updating on schedule. I've been using the beta's of NNW 3.1 and decided I'd pay when 3.1 was final. It's way better than Safari RSS - I just never knew it because (until recently) Safari was good enough.

So the dedicated (paid or unpaid) RSS readers were already becoming a product for a shrinking niche. It's similar to the early Netscape/MSIE days. Netscape made good money selling its browser. Along came MSIE for free. MSIE may have sucked, but it was free and good enough for most folks. Netscape had to change its business model (server software sales). To me, that's what NewsGator is doing. I hope they don't go down the path of Netscape's doom, although if AOL wants to buy them for a few Billion I doubt they'd complain...

I also think NewsGator had to do this to stay relevant. Get more folks into the NNW fold and some will transition to their paid enterprise products. Otherwise they'd all go to some existing or yet-to-be-free product, and NNW/NewGator would go away.

For Mac shareware RSS readers, this is another nail in the coffin. But it was headed this way anyway. RSS has become a must-have tool which is why it's become part of the OS (Safari, Leopard Mail, and the RSS API's). There's still room for shareware RSS readers - they'd just need to be even better than the free stuff. For some, NNW's data collection may be enough of a reason to find something else. Another smaller subset, but I'll be it's there.

I disagree this is overall bad for the Mac shareware market. There are endless opportunities for new products, both in existing submarkets and in submarkets yet to be discovered. In time, some of those submarkets will become must-have's, and will become OS (and Google/Yahoo/MSN) features. Just part of the ebb and flow. Gone (for most folks) are commercial email apps, commercial web browsers, music players, and now RSS readers. These are the ebbs and flows we've been with forever.

And in the process, some Mac programmers will establish the next "must have" submarket and do well by selling their app to Apple or other bigger company. For many, there's nothing wrong with cashing out.

Markus Defuns
Thu Jan 10 08:51:23 2008

Oh, Dave Watanabe can no longer sell this adware? How sad! :->

Dale Gardner
Thu Jan 10 09:14:22 2008

@Markus

Can you explain the Dave Watanabe comment?? I'm a very happy user of NewsFire - which I started using when NetNewsWire was picked up and forcefully integrated into NewsGator's information-gathering effort (see @Graham).

Is there something I missed?

ssp
Thu Jan 10 09:14:47 2008

Thanks for the post and the interesting discussion. Even as – seemingly – the only person who uses neither NNW (too complex) nor Google Reader (not working offline), I can see how this changes the fortunes of NNW's competition. Particularly the comparison to the e-mail market seems seems both plausible and painful.

The only difference I can see to the e-mail situation is the relevance of software. Everybody is using e-mail while very few people are using RSS readers or even know what they'd be good for. And I'd guess that for the vast majority of users who are not using RSS already the paid-for feed readers never stood a chance anyway as built-in solutions such as Safari's might be good enough for them or they'll go straight to web-based services as those who started late with e-mail did as well.

Scott Frazer
Thu Jan 10 09:19:10 2008

Personally, I was kind of shocked when I switched to the Mac that I was going to have to pay for features I got for free on the Windows side of things (at the time my reader of choice was RSS Bandit)

I ended up trying a bunch of the for-pay solutions and settled on Google Reader instead. When you combine it with Google Gears, you've got an offline reader with all the features of an online one.

John Detmier
Thu Jan 10 09:22:13 2008

Safari does RSS. Mail does RSS. All of this is driven by the underlying PubSub framework.

Just like Webkit allows any developer to quickly put a unique face on a web browser, PubSub allows innovative interfaces for RSS.

And being standard toolkits, different apps can make use of common resources. All of your feeds set up in one app can be easily accessed by another app.

Andrew Neely
Thu Jan 10 09:34:12 2008

@ssp You're not the only one who neither uses NNW nor GR. I'm reading this in Vienna, which I dumped NetNewsWire for over a year and a half ago because of price and performance issues on an older portable machine I had.

I agree that NNW has the reputation of being the "it" RSS reader on OS X and combining that with free is going to be tough for potential developers to deal with, but Vienna's had me spoiled for while since it's both free and open source.

Before that, I used the website Bloglines exclusively (with some extra functionality provided by a Greasemonkey script). Before that, I used Sage because it could integrate directly into Firefox.

Even if the RSS market becomes like the browser market at the turn of the century, the paradigm will somehow change and things will become competitive again. No one 8 years ago foresaw Firefox and other free browsers becoming IE's main competitor nor that search revenue would become a major source of income.

ramanan
Thu Jan 10 09:45:49 2008

TextWrangler, which does quite a bit, didn't destroy the text editor market. Opera chugs along while competing with both free and is freedom and free as in beer alternatives. I think there is a bit too much doom and gloom here. People pay for what they want. NetNewsWire won't be for everyone, even though it's free.

LKM
Thu Jan 10 09:51:31 2008

NNW's competition is Google Reader and other online apps. They're free, too, and don't require syncing, so they got an advantage out of the box. NNW has its work cut out for it. There won't be stagnation.

Erik J. Barzeski
Thu Jan 10 10:21:19 2008

I agree: "NNW won't be for everyone, even if it's free." I'm not here to pimp any other feed readers, but I will say that many do unique things that NNW doesn't, and $10-$30 is really a very small price to pay for an app that is, to many, one of the key apps in their daily routine.

Nate Cavanaugh
Thu Jan 10 10:36:11 2008

I have to disagree with your comments about this move lowering the value of software.
What it's done is raised the value of innovation.

I can understand that you have a stake in making money for your livelihood, but your reasoning seems a bit "union-esque".
It seems like what you're saying is "Don't do this good thing that MANY people will benefit from, because it makes MY job harder".

What this move means is that fewer will enter the RSS market, but not all. There are problems in NetNewsWire, and someone will want to make a better product, and yes, someone may want to do it for free (you know, the open source world is driven by people who work on things because it's their passion, not necessarily because they're being paid), and if not, no big loss.

The reason why it's no big loss is because it will drive the hard working innovators to a market that is more likely to pay dividends. And the new work that people pioneer in those markets, the products that come from that, people will pay for.

There is plenty of money to be made. But, like everything in this world, it's tough work, but thats life. It's not like software developers have it tough, and the rest of the world is just relaxing doing nothing but surfing the web in their free browser and keeping up to date with their free RSS clients.

If you're an RSS provider for the Mac, what this move has done is made people get creative with how they monetize.
That's not a bad thing. It's a bad thing only if you want the world to stay status quo.

Avi Flax
Thu Jan 10 10:58:31 2008

I think that you're correct that there will be a downturn in innovation in the desktop newsreader segment, but I think it may only be temporary. This is a shake-up, and there will definitely be casualties and downsides. But when the dust settles, we won't see a space with zero innovation. The innovation will ramp up again, after a period of time for people to adjust to the new landscape and see new opportunities for innovation.

I do think that this particular shift was inevitable, as the core user base of newsreaders is one which almost universally uses multiple devices, and which doesn't have the time or patience for a non-syncing experience. Therefore a server component is becoming necessary to make any newsreader viable.

I do agree that this does mean that independent software developers will no longer be able to make a living (or part of one) in this segment. While I sympathize with those developers who are affected by this, I do think it's just part of the reality of doing business in any segment. I don't think this is akin to Microsoft intentionally killing Netscape and dominating a space through monopolistic action and sheer size - this was necessary for Newsgator to compete successfully with GooReader et al.

Jeremy Pinnix
Thu Jan 10 11:04:46 2008

Response to Paul's comment: "I have to disagree, at least in part, with this. Brent said much the same thing when we spoke, but I don't think it's happened yet. I still use a desktop reader, as do millions of others. Online readers might have been the true death knell for desktop readers, but this move hastened that death."

Even as long ago as June 27, 2006, TechCrunch was seeing approximately 73% of their traffic coming from web readers.

Ben
Thu Jan 10 11:05:10 2008

Nate just posted everything I was going to say, so I'll just second it.

Also

Newsgator + NNW != Microsoft + IE

Don
Thu Jan 10 11:34:01 2008

Many years ago, drugstores and grocery stores began selling books. Bookstore owners complained bitterly, claiming it would drive them out of business. It didn't.

Years later, bookstore owners complained bitterly about the book-of-the-month-club, claiming it would drive them out of business. It didn't.

More recently, bookstore owners have complained about on-line bookstores such as Amazon.com, claiming it would drive them out of business. It hasn't.

In each case, bookstores have done quite well if they offered something better and more desirable than the competition. Bookstores aren't as convenient as drugstores, but they offer a much wider selection. If all they did was carry the same books as drugstores, they'd have long been out of business. Similarly, if all bookstores offered was one book a month at a discount, they'd have gone out of business. If they try to compete with Amazon on price, they'll be out of business soon, too.

Bookstores survive and thrive by presenting something that the competition simply doesn't have.

Similarly, copycat software developers who try to sell what is essentially the same thing as found in freeware are going to fail. On the other hand, if a developer offers software that has more wanted features, is faster, smaller, doesn't crash, and works better with other software than competition--even if the competition is free--that application and the developer will survive and thrive.

TextEdit, what is essentially a low-end word processor, comes free with every Mac. That hasn't prevented Microsoft from making millions off of Word. Nor has it prevented more than 30 other developers from selling or giving away word/text processors.

The action of NewsGator may indeed result in loss of business for developers with a product that does the same thing as NNW, perhaps with a slightly different interface and one or two different features. But it will also open the market to more people. If a developer makes a product that is significantly better than NNW there will be a larger potential audience and more people who will pay for it.

Competition helps to make products better. Price competition--even giving things away--can always be dealt with by providing a significantly better product that people want. You could give away all of the bad-tasting cookies you want. That won't stop people from buyiing Oreos.

Spiro Agnew
Thu Jan 10 11:37:15 2008

I really don't see the problem here.

(a) NNW is not the first free, full-featured RSS client for the Mac (I believe that distinction may belong to Vienna), it's not even the second, and it probably won't be the last.

(b) NewsGator discloses the information gathering, and you can opt out. The problem is when they DON'T tell you, or try to obscure it.

And, Barzeski, it wouldn't be out of line here to disclose that you're the author of Cyndicate, a direct competitor to NNW.

Chris
Thu Jan 10 11:37:44 2008

While I think this post is quite insightful, this was a move NetNewsWire probably had to make.

Desktop-based RSS readers are facing very stiff competition from free server-based RSS readers like Google Reader. And to be honest, desktop-based RSS readers don't make a lot of sense. Because RSS is based on polling, a desktop-based reader needs to be running all the time to be able to keep up with fast-moving feeds, otherwise items get missed and you can't count on your reader. But everyone has laptops these days and they're not always on.

The three main potential advantages of desktop apps are OS/user experience consistency, customizability, and speed, but NetNewsWire only really provides the first. The library of custom scripts is weak for nonprogrammers, there is no simple way to screen scrape sites without RSS feeds for nonprogrammers, and the smart folder filters in NNW are only based on limited criteria. Google Reader was much faster than NNW 3.0 with large collections of items, though 3.1 partially addresses this. Even if these issues were fully addressed, you'd still have the basic problem, which is that you need some kind of server component to properly poll your subscribed feeds, unless your computer is always on. (NNW has this, but its NewsGator synchronization has always tended to be unreliable.)

Basically, it's the web that matured and killed desktop RSS readers, not giving away NNW for free.

John Koetsier
Thu Jan 10 11:38:17 2008

I don't agree that the value of software on Mac is degraded by this move. I think this move is indicative that the competitive price for feed readers is free.

Google reader, Safari, others have been mentioned. There are more.

The fact is, these products are "good enough" for most ...

Dylan
Thu Jan 10 12:22:03 2008

Paul, the point about NNW Lite, in my mind, wasn't that it was free and NNW was not, therefore showing value in the full NNW. Instead, the point was that NNW Lite was good enough that it was already a deteriment for others trying to do RSS apps.

When I had switched to endo I recommended it to a few friends, and they weren't interested at the time because they used NNW Lite which was more than good enough for them. Of course, now that endo is free people might choose that as well instead of NNW:

http://infinite-sushi.com/software/endo/

Thanks for the explanation of why you didn't mention Google Reader. It's really an excellent way of reading RSS.As I said, I paid for two RSS readers and still ended up switching, so in my case, the "free vs. paid" wasn't an issue.

I'm hoping once the iPhone SDK is released there could be an iPhone NNW and if that happens I'll consider it again.

Finally, while I agree with the general idea that making more apps free can have an effect of devaluing software in general, I personally think that RSS readers, which is really an extension of web browsing, was sort of doomed to become free. Even though I've paid for OmniWeb in my experience with others the idea of paying for a web browser is almost always a non-starter, and for those people, they're already predisposed to think that way.

jhn
Thu Jan 10 12:32:36 2008

(1) NNW syncing between Macs (via their own service, if not through .Mac) works really, really well, and their iPhone client is the best I've tried. I was considered switching to a web-based reader to avoid syncing headaches, but NNW's syncing works about as well as IMAP.

(2) "Valueless" software might lead to slightly less innovation in particular markets in the short term, but that still might be good for consumers. A lot of great software out there that few people use isn't necessarily a plus for society. I like the Mac world better than the Linux world because I can afford it, but I remain convinced that the model of free, "value-less" software is more sustainable in the long term.

Reid
Thu Jan 10 13:10:00 2008

As time goes by, lower-level software becomes commoditized. That's just the way it goes.

When Windows 3.1 was around, people paid good money for things like TCP/IP stacks. Seriously.

There is RSS-reader sample code by the boatload out there, especially for Mac developers. I am not at all surprised that it is becoming commoditized.

Les
Thu Jan 10 13:24:55 2008

Attention all RSS makers. This has opened an opportunity. The Mac desktop world needs an RSS reader that syncs online and keeps your privacy. I find the trade off of being data-mined in exchange for a free reader horrid for my needs and I know others feel the same. Is this niche enough? Who knows.

But I don't want my feed data, especially protected feeds, shared with third parties in any way what-so-ever. That's why I stuck with NNW for so long instead of switching to an online reader like Google.

Sandy McMurray
Thu Jan 10 13:55:44 2008

The value of software hasn't dropped, just the value of RSS reading software (like the value of e-mail software, as others have noted).

Reid beat me to it by mentioning commodities. NNW once did things that were valuable and rare. Now they're valuable but common, so the price has dropped to nothing.

Paul, if you're not a Google Reader user, you should at least check it out. I'm suggesting this from a purely business point of view, not for your personal use. Google (and other "online software" companies) are growing competition and may soon be eating your lunch if you don't pay attention.

What Google gets in return for all its free services is data -- lots of it -- about what users are doing with their free products. I'm okay with that transaction. Your mileage may vary.

Incidentally, I think this is one of the most overlooked gems in Apple's iPod/iTunes strategy: the value of iTunes store data. Apple knows what people want far more than any single music label or bricks and mortar retailer, because they can track both sales AND searches, and cross-reference the data.

Back to free software. Tongue in cheek, I suggest that software developers consider this angle: "Buy our premium software, which collects absolutely no information about you (not even "in aggregate") and stay as anonymous and private as possible.

Sandy McMurray
Thu Jan 10 14:31:19 2008

P.S. The perceived value of software on the Mac went UP today too!

See http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/447/indie-fever

Graham Parks
Thu Jan 10 14:31:52 2008

NewsGator discloses the information gathering, and you can opt out. The problem is when they DON'T tell you, or try to obscure it.

Having got the working version of 3.1 now, the options are indeed slightly obfuscated. You have a choice to opt-in to syncing, then opt-out of also submitting "attention data". What isn't clear to me is whether, if you choose to do the latter, your sync data itself is still mined. The ToS seem to allow mining of anything.

I think this is more an unclear interface than deliberate obfuscation, but it's not good this situation exists at all.

Razvan ME
Thu Jan 10 14:45:35 2008

Back to free software. Tongue in cheek, I suggest that software developers consider this angle: "Buy our premium software, which collects absolutely no information about you (not even "in aggregate") and stay as anonymous and private as possible.

This looks like extortion to me. :P

Dustin MacDonald
Thu Jan 10 14:56:15 2008

This is a great move. Feed readers are far too much alike these days. With options like Mail and Safari already included on the Mac, and plenty of web-based readers available for free as well, NetNewsWire being free doesn't really change a thing.

What changes is the push for innovation. The value of these kinds of apps will go down, but there are many issues with the common RSS reader. I expect we'll see a real rethinking of how RSS and news can be better taken advantage of with a desktop client, maybe not too long from now.

Scott
Thu Jan 10 14:56:17 2008

I agree with Jeremy. Google Reader and others HAVE killed the desktop RSS client. I'm the last person in the world to prefer online over offline apps, but when I tried Google Reader, I got it. With no work whatsoever, I have my feeds no matter where I go, and for once a web interface is actually better than most of the RSS clients on the desktop that I've tried.

I was as surprised as anyone that I felt this way. But I did. I think having a separate app for RSS on the desktop is going to die. Why not use the browser, which is where you're gonna be when you click to read the full story anyway?

J
Thu Jan 10 18:42:53 2008

I'm probably a bit older than some of the folks who have left comments here. My son got a Mac and was so impressed that he got me a Mac mini a couple of months ago. On my old PC, one of the programs I used a lot was my newsreader, and GreatNews was my newsreader of choice, and I was disappointed that GreatNews doesn't have a Mac version. So I set out trying newsreaders that would work on the Mac. I think I tried every one of them, including a few obscure ones that nobody's ever heard of. My choice in the end? Vienna. It allowed me to do the one thing I really wanted, which is read articles in a continuous stream, without having to select each article individually.

I will add that as a past user of Windows, and to a lesser degree, Kubuntu Linux, I was VERY shocked that so much of the software that would have been freely available in the Windows and/or Linux world was only available in for-pay versions for the Mac. I began to wonder what I had gotten myself into, until I discovered some of the great Mac freeware sites. When I saw this post, I realized that you guys are reliving the same arguments that were being thrown around five or ten years ago in the Windows and Linux worlds. When Windows '95 first came out, and someone released a piece of freeware, you'd hear all the makers of competitive commercial software crying and carping about it. But they soon discovered that accomplished nothing (other than to make some folks really angry with them), and that they either had to add value to their products so they would be worth paying for, or go out of business.

Bear in mind that even today, Mac users that really want to have freeware can run Wine or Crossover and get access to a fair amount of Windows software (I was able to bring over some free Windows software for which I could find no free Mac equivalents), or Fink to run a large number of Linux programs. Fink is free, by the way, but you have to be something of a Linux guru (and not short on hard drive space) to install it under Leopard, and I'm not that proficient with Linux.

All those Mac vs. PC commercials are working, but as PC users are coming over, they expect to get the trivial apps for free, and even some not-so-trivial apps that way. So if you can't make your app non-trivial, or give it features that will make it a must-have and not likely to be included in free software, then maybe it's time to move on - a lot of people who tried to make a killing on trivial Windows apps back in the 90's found that out the hard way.

Harvard Irving
Thu Jan 10 18:55:45 2008

I think you are confusing "value" with "cost". These are not the same thing. There is plenty of free software that is immensely valuable. By the same token, there are plenty of expensive apps which are garbage.

Far from reducing innovation, I think this raises it. Sure, mundane apps like newsreaders might become free. But I think everybody expected that, anyway.

Let's look at the things that haven't been done for free - like high-end video editing and graphics packages. When Apple came out with Final Cut Pro, Avid was charging many times more for their software. Yet FCP was far more innovative. The outrageous price-tag for Avid was doing nothing to encourage innovation - it just encouraged complacency.

Similar situation with Quark and InDesign. With Aperture and Lightroom. Now even Photoshop has some Core Image based editors nipping at its heels.

All of these are good things. One day, there's going to be an Open Source project that manages to do what Final Cut Pro does. It's not likely to be any time soon, but it will happen.

You say that the quality of software in the Linux world isn't up to "Mac Standards". In many ways that's true - but it's because the current OSS developers have a different area of expertise, and aren't very experienced in GUI design and things like graphics and video.

However, when it comes to key areas such as networking, the web and servers, Linux and other OSS software is best-of-breed. Just look at how many of our "innovative" Mac apps are just GUI wrappers around an OSS engine or library.

One day, the OSS community will mature and diversify. Then you will get projects that make great GUIs and graphics software. Heck, we may even get great documentation from OSS projects, what with the rise of Wikis.

In summary:

The price of software is dropping, while its value and functionality is increasing. This is a great trend. This is what the technology world needs to advance and reach new heights.

Business models are constantly becoming obsolete. That's life, that's progress. No use complaining about it - just move on to the next thing. There's plenty of software that's difficult to develop, that people will pay big money for. But it requires much skill to develop those things.

The upshot is that only the best programmers and developers will be able to stay in business. That's fantastic. Remember when any hack "web designer" could charge vast amounts of money without having any skill? Aren't you glad those days are over? To be competitive, you need to bring something to the table.

André
Fri Jan 11 10:15:06 2008

I downloaded NetNewsWire yesterday, but after using its cluttered interface for a day I still prefer NetNewsWire Lite. Sorry, about that :-)

OBCM
Sat Jan 12 00:14:14 2008

The decision is sure to hurt a very very small segment of the shareware community but its a great thing for consumers. I completely understand why the affected developers may not be impressed but from my point of view as a freeware developer i would rather see consumers win out over a few shareware developers.

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