Last week I had a couple thoughts (jumbled) about subscription hits, in the guise of supporting works of public good. But there's another prevalent version of this in the technowilds, of course, which is subscription service access to software and resources.
In the past week Microsoft got some press by promoting (again, this must be the fourth or fifth time they've done it) hosted services for Small and Medium businesses. This would open up a nice revenue stream that would augment the renewal costs businesses go through when they upgrade every other (or every third)) version of Office or Windows that the coding monsters at MSFT push out; nobody can afford to perform a full upgrade every year or two (and with release schedules in Redmond slowing to a more realistic level, hopefully we won't need to).
At the same time, Apple appears to be ramping up their own .Mac subscription offering, though unlike Microsoft, this is firmly pitched at household and singleton instances. From the scuttlebutt, while the enhanced .Mac Sync services in Tiger are still away a bit under a year from public deployment, at the WWDC this year Apple had stong promotion of the .Mac SDK which opened a number of eyes to reusing that underpinning. Getting developer buy-in forms a nice undersell for the service, as users get one-click access to features that make their computer more network-centric, it enhances the features which Apple has bundled into .Mac
For the user community, Apple has kicked off a tour of promotion for .Mac, complete with T-Shirts and promotion (it's coming to Chicago on the 16th, but confusingly is not listed on the public iCal for the store).
While at smaller scales than Windows, Apple appears to have a somewhat easier time getting people to move OS' when they do their periodic upgrades (it was yearly, now it looks like it'll be more like 15 months between Panther and Tiger, if I guess correctly) - John Gruber has done some nice ad hoc analysis of this. But assuming for Apple this adoption slows down commensurate with release schedules, and the number of iLife enhancements that cost money slows, getting more people to cough up the $100/year for a .Mac membership will provide a nice smoothing of the revenue curves (as will ITMS, of course).
As a shareholder (minority is too strong a word for my ownership...) I applaud this move to promote their offerings. As a subscriber to .Mac (and I feel that the money was well spent while I went through my rebuild week recently), I'm pleased to see new services coming out.
Posted by esinclai at July 09, 2004 07:31 AM |