Fannie Freedman

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My grandmother passed away this weekend. Her funeral is today. She lived 95 years, all but the last couple very healthy.

My grandmother was an amazing woman. She was the oldest of four kids, born just before the depression. Her father did odd jobs after coming to the US and sometime before she was a teenager he bought a junk yard with some partners. Within a year the partners reneged on their deal and her father had to go to loan sharks to keep the business going.

Everyone in the family helped out in that business. My grandmother, a very independent woman, did bookkeeping, tore cars apart, worked the counter, everything. Today it wouldn’t seem like such a big deal but in 1930 that was still pretty unusual.

She learned to drive (I’m sure before 16) and took care of everyone. She met my grandfather at age 18, married at 21. They literally spent a lifetime together (72 years!) and she always remained independent.

My grandmother took care of people. She helped the old folks who couldn’t get out, she started the gift shop at the synagogue. Her father died of a sudden heart attack very early (he wasn’t feeling well, went to the doctors on the way home from work and had a heart attack while in the doctor’s office. Dead.) Everyone had to pick up the slack. My grandparents, who had moved to a city nearby, came back to Massillon to run the family business.

They had three kids together, six grand kids, and nine great grand children, so far. My grandmother always seemed to have food available. She always had some food ready to whip out for us kids, more than willing to make matzah brie for a noontime lunch or quick with some chicken dish she seemed to prepare in 20 minutes but tasted like she had been working on it all day. Wanted a little something in the car? There were pretzels in the backseat.

They were in their early 60s when they bought a lake house and spent their summers on the water, skiing, gardening and doing the things lazy summers are supposed to be about. In their 70s they moved to a new home and lived in it, independently, for over 20 years.

A couple of years ago my aunt died of cancer. My grandmother had a hard time after that. Her health started to slip, dementia started to creep in. Two years ago my grandfather passed away, just a week short of his 93rd birthday, and grandma couldn’t be on her own anymore. She was done and basically, over the next two years, willed herself to death.

My grandparents were very important to me. They were role models for business, for life, for marriage and responsibility. While it is a sad day, this is also a day that I feel very lucky. I’m lucky because I got to know my grandparents into my late 30s, because they got to know my wife and my children.

I came to town a few weeks ago to see her one last time. She was very weak, could barely roll over in her bed to talk. My dad told me she wasn’t talking much, a few minutes maybe. (Again, I feel lucky. I was able to talk with her for 20-30 minutes each the next couple of days.) My eldest daughter came with me, more to see her grandpa (my dad) then to see her great grandmother. On the first day we stopped in to say hello.

My grandmother got a huge grin on her face when she saw Laura, aged 7, recognizing her immediately. It was her last smile.

Replying To Google Play Reviews Do’s and Don’ts

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Google announced that developers can now reply to reviews in Google Play, Android’s app store. I thought I would add a few Do’s and Don’ts for us developers to consider. For instance,

DO reply to correct facts.

This is worth doing. A customer says your product doesn’t have feature XYZ and you respond, saying it does and how to find it. I would highly suggest being very polite about it, though.

Another one,

DO answer feature requests.

A lot of customers will request features through the review system. It is a great use of the reply option to tell them the app is adding this with the next release or that you will consider the suggested change.

As a corollary, though,

DON’T tell the customer a feature is coming and then fail to follow through.

If you fail to follow through, you are now a liar and the customer will feel obligated to tell everyone in all reviews moving forward. Not much worse than this.

Oh, wait, there is something worse than this,

DON’T argue with customers over opinions.

A spitting contest won’t do you any good and you can’t argue with the customer anyway. Others will just read it as argumentative. Or as John Moltz points out, “This could end up being [your] opportunity to go from being labelled ‘developer of lousy, one-star app that should be free’ to ‘asshole developer of lousy, one-star app that should be free’.”

Since I like to be positive, let’s finish off with this one,

DO wait before posting.

This is the “don’t be an idiot” rule. (Okay, that wasn’t very positive.) People say rude things, especially when there is a cold-hearted company on the other end. After all, to them there is no difference between Microsoft and a sole proprietor. It is easy, as someone who has sunk heart and sole into the product that is now being ripped apart to rip back. This will end badly. So write that response, read it over a few times, chuckle to yourself regarding your witty repertoire, then delete it. Trust me, you’ll be better off to forget this one.

The Future Is Subscription For All Productivity Apps

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To back up my comments about paid apps being dead, Ben Thompson writes about Adobe’s business model switch. [1] (If you missed it, all Adobe products will forever more be subscription only.) His point is that the economic surplus of productivity apps makes them far more valuable then the prices charged so a switch to subscription makes a ton of sense (for all productivity apps, not just Adobe).

(He makes such pretty graphs.) Ben’s comments:

The challenges facing Adobe are shared by almost all productivity apps.

  • Productivity apps are indispensable (and thus priceless) to some users
  • Productivity apps usually have high learning curves
  • Well-done productivity apps require significant investment up-front
  • Productivity apps require regular maintenance and upgrades

Unfortunately, app store economics don’t really work here.

  • If you have a low price, you need massive volume to make up for the upfront costs
  • If you have a high price, users are much less likely to buy your app, especially since there is likely a learning curve
  • If you can’t monetize over time, your users are extracting MUCH more value than you are receiving in revenue. That’s great if you’re a user, up until the company you love sells out because they can’t make money. Sparrow is the canonical example here. How many Sparrow devotees would gladly pay $5 a month to have the app available and continually updated?

The challenge here — and I think this is a huge challenge for Adobe — is that I’m not certain the traditional software apps can make this transition. Take Quickbooks for example. $20 per month gets you access and store your data with Intuit, and that price doesn’t even include everything the Windows version does for $100. Does Intuit make more? Sure, but it leaves me feeling bitter that Intuit is trying to extract $480 worth of value for what used to cost me $100. [2] My general feeling: over my dead body.

I have a hard time believing that my customers would accept paying even $20 per year for powerOne, even if it was available on all platforms and the web, synced templates and more. [3] powerOne is designed as a “buy one time” product, like almost all productivity apps of yesteryear. It’s not my customer’s fault that that product is now priced too low to support my company. That’s app store dynamics at work.

Re-thinking the product to go along with the model change is imperative.

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[1] If you aren’t reading this guy, you should be. Amazingly good writer and thinker. Haven’t been this blown away since Horace Dediu at Asymco appeared on the scene four years ago.

[2] Most people I know only upgrade every couple of years.

[3] In fact I know I’d lose most of them. We asked about advanced features for even $5 per year and had very few takers.

The Market For Paid Productivity Apps Is Definitely Dead

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Marco Arment linked to a blog post and commented that paid iOS apps are not dead:

In most categories, if you either solve a new problem that a lot of people have, or solve an old problem in a new and better way, you can sell a paid app today just as well as you could in 2008. In fact, the market is much bigger now. But, as with any maturing market, you’ll need to do more to get noticed since so many problems have already been solved so well.

Bull, unless of course you make games. Apps — of the productivity persuasion — are indeed dead. If you can’t make a living, what’s the use. In 1999 Palm sold 6 million units. Infinity Softworks, in its first full year of sales, sold $200,000 worth of software. That means we made about $0.03/device sold. I was breakeven and made a living for myself. In 2009, our first full year of selling iPhone apps, Apple sold 20 million units. We brought to the table a decade of customers moving to iOS, an App Store in its infancy (less competition), and an app far more capable then anything I wrote in 1999. We made about $50,000, or a very pathetic $0.0025 per device sold. Yes we have had more success since mostly because we were involved with the iPad launch, but not one of these years has approached our peak Palm years. (1999 was not our peak.)

In other words, not only is there no market for paid (Android and iOS productivity) apps [1], there probably never really was. The occasional hit comes and goes, but the peak is too short lived to sustain a reasonable productivity app. A few of those early apps (like Instapaper) had staying power, but there were precious few of them, and far less than in the Palm/Windows Mobile days, especially when you consider how many more devices are being sold now than before.

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[1] I want to be very clear here. I am talking about one-time purchase productivity apps, the kind where you buy the app and use it. In the old days we sold those apps and then sold upgrades. I believe the market for productivity tools is moving to subscriptions.

Here’s To The Crazy Ones

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Thank you, Seth Levine! In summary he says:

So here’s to those entrepreneurs who are toiling away because they truly believe passionately in what they are doing and are going to make their idea a success whatever it takes. Building a business is crazy hard. You’d have to be half insane to even think about trying. So kudos to those who are out there toiling away at it. You are the real stars of the entrepreneurial world!

Passionate? Check. 10 years? Uh, check (its like lying about ones age). Stubborn? Oh, yes, check. Insane? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. (Just a little bit.)