A little more than two years ago, Brent Simmons came to me with an intriguing proposition. Would I be willing to talk with NewsGator about the possibility of taking over MarsEdit, the desktop blog editing software Brent had developed as an adjunct to his RSS feed reader, NetNewsWire. My answer was about as close to […]

If you’re a software developer or web-savvy businessperson, you’ve probably heard of 37 Signals’s famous book, Getting Real, which aims to pass on some of the company’s wisdom about how to build and market relatively simple end-user applications. The book is aimed primarily at developers of web applications, expected considering the web is 37 Signals’s […]

Seth Godin writes today about an alleged dichotomy between products that customers “love” and products that customers find “unannoying.” I think smart marketers at Apple work to make products that people love. Smart marketers at American Airlines ought to work at making an airline that isn’t annoying. I find this false distinction hard to stomach. […]

There has been much debate in the iPhone developer community about the price of applications for sale in Apple’s App Store. These prices are trending cheaper and cheaper, such that even products of considerable complexity are often available for just $1 or $2. I have myself experimented with selling a dirt-cheap and dead-simple application, Shush, […]