Quote:
Originally Posted by Meemo
Otherwise, why not make them more like the independent reading apps like Aldiko, Bluefire, Stanza, and best of all, the brilliant Marvin.
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Because the real focus of these corporations is
money -- not books, not art, and not literature.
I think it's a fundamental business principle to focus on where the bulk of your revenue is streaming from -- and you can more or less disregard the minority sources of your income. If you're a polite corporation, you won't say so openly; you will
pretend as if you cared about each and every customer of yours; but in reality, you will focus on the grey, indistinguishable mass of users, where most of your money is coming from.
How many readers expect advanced functionality from e-reader software? One percent? Two percent? Five percent, if we're very optimistic? If your primary concern is
money, it would be insane paying too much attention to the wishes of the tiny minority of 1%, 2% or 5% of your customers. That those 5% might be your
smartest customers, with the highest IQ, is completely irrelevant. It's not about quality of software, not about being smart, not about intelligence -- it's all about the money, Lebowski.
Quantity over quality. Dumb users will always constitute the crushing majority of users of any software that is widely spread -- see also the inanity that is the "Ribbon" in Office, or the entire Windows 8 operating system, as delivered by Microsoft. All of that is done in the interest of obliging the crushing majority of
dumb users. That you may be alienating the 5% of your smartest users in the process of obliging the dumb ones -- that may be sad, but that's simply a necessity, as long as your primary focus is
money, rather than quality.
The only reason Marvin's quality is so high is that, apparently, Kris does not expect to be making a living off of it. (I am still shocked Marvin is completely free to use; certainly, a price of at least a couple of dollars would be perfectly justified.) Because Kris is free from money concerns while developing Marvin, he can focus on the only thing that
really matters -- quality of software, advanced functionality. The results of that different focus can be seen after only a few months: his software is already today clearly superior over the products of gigantic multinational "software" corporations.
They are not really "software" corporations as much as
money-making machines; the software these corporations produce is merely a
tool to achieve the ultimate goal, which is
money; whereas for Kris, it appears that the
tool itself is the ultimate goal -- which explains why it's such a fantastic tool, much better than anything the corporations have to offer.