Comments on: Take Money Or Accept Money?

By: Chad

Chad — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 20:40:01 +0000

If what I’ve read before is correct, Wil helped write up The Omni Group’s Philosophy (http://www.omnigroup.com/company/whatisomni/), which is pretty up front about things. Unless your business is a financial institution, your company’s primary goal should never be “To Make Money”. Otherwise, if there is no proper passion for the product or service you are promoting, why even bother?

Case in point:
Perhaps it is just my perception, but it seems that in the years since Bruce Chizen has taken over, Adobe has become more like Microsoft — a monolithic company trying to expand in every which way in the neverending quest for more money. (And perhaps this shouldn’t be too surprising considering that Bruce Chizen worked for Microsoft as a sales director at one time).

By: Justin Miller

Justin Miller — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 15:33:04 +0000

I think Wil’s hook is:

The point of any company should be to make customers want to give it money, NOT to get money from customers.

By: pauldwaite

pauldwaite — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 21:10:22 +0000

I know what y’all mean, but I can’t get too excited about the ringtone debacle. If you don’t like the ringtone deal (and I sure don’t), then don’t buy any. I can’t believe that the ringtone market isn’t mostly made up of kids who just haven’t grown out of ringtone inanity yet. And hopefully most of those kids can’t afford iPhones yet.

So let iTunes ringtones go the way of the iPod Hifi.

By: jcburns

jcburns — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 18:54:06 +0000

Well, also , accept money versus extort the money from us.

The iPhone is my first cell phone—of any kind, ever—and I didn’t buy it because I had any enthusiasm about AT&T’s policies, openness, or tech savvy.

Indeed, I’m not at all happy with AT&T’s entire approach to the market. I bought an iPhone on the faith that that Apple’s (relative) openness and user-centric approach would win out in the battle of boardroom hearts and minds, but recent developments in the iTunes arena are making me less sanguine about that being a safe bet.

By: Lee

Lee — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 18:05:03 +0000

I’m a partner in a ‘coffee-shop startup’ and we’ve been working on a major revamp for over a year now and are about to release – but this same pricing question has been plaguing us for months also – thanks so much for outlining your thoughts! The comments to your previous article about this topic were also very useful – at least I don’t feel alone in this question and have some things to ponder.

It also seems to be a great forum to put a ‘HOORAH’ forward to all the independent developers out there. If the number of donations on previous efforts were even directly related to the number of times our wives are going to ask us when one of our ventures is going to simply pay for the coffee we drink each week – well the circular problem would be…circular? Just like Daniel, we identify that this isn’t the point but that is a hard ’sell’ in itself. Best of luck to all.