Quote:
Originally Posted by Sparrow
Personally, I wouldn't ditch the device straight away - but when it came to replacing it, I'd buy the next one elsewhere. (I wouldn't buy upgrades in the meantime.)
Also, I think firms offering new types of devices need early adopters to get going; and early adopters need to know they're not going to have to pay for improved firmware - which is a punishment for buying too soon.
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I agree with that. Companies rely on early adopters buying expensive stuff which still has some bugs and lacks features. They provide important feedback and when the company then decides that those people had some excellent ideas which makes the product much more marketable, they then should have to pay for it? Seems a little unfair and I would expect that a lot of people would rather wait for a while before they buy (like waiting for the 1st Service Pack before you buy the next Windows).
This is not to say that I wouldn't be willing to pay for certain features, e.g. if Cybook introduced support for a new ebook format I would be willing to pay a small fee for that. I would not want to pay for bug fixes and minor improvements to - say - UI or drivers (if it's just cosmetic I don't need it and if it's necessary I would classify that as a bug).
The problem is that I doubt that this would be a viable business model for a company. Customers should have the right to bug fixes free of charge. That means that after they added a new chargeable feature they would have to offer two separate FW branches: one containing only bug fixes and one with the fixes plus the added feature. That could even split up further...
If you also take into account that every payment produces cost for the company (credit card fees, transaction fees, employees, software, etc.) a lot of small payments are not as lucrative as fewer but larger payments. It would be very hard to make any real money with that business model.
Also don't forget that if you can't make people accept the fact (or the price) that you charge for some feature they might try to get the FW update via illegal channels. Considering the small size of a FW compared to music files or DVDs I should think it's easy enough to share it illegally (and the media lobby won't help a small company fighting against illegal sharing of their FW).
Not that piracy should be any reason not to sell something. I just want to point out that if you are thinking of introducing a business model which people won't easily accept and which is rather weak in the first place that the chances of failure are rather high.