Re: ipad

Friends:

At the risk of sounding like a whiney cry-baby, I think I am aligned with Messrs. Olinsky and Thomas. US$50 seems like an astonishingly high price for OmniGraffle.iPad. Here is my reasoning:

I do not know too much about marketing (and this is where the OmniGroup folks could call me out), but I know that application pricing is an art and a science. Ideally, one wants to price an application at a high enough price that *some* fraction of the potential audience will wince — otherwise, the company is leaving money on the table. I do not know what that fraction is, but let us say it is 20% of the potential market. Finding that exact price is, I am sure, tricky.

I also know that one does not want to price the app so high that too much of the market passes on the sale. If, say, 80% of the potential market passes on the sale, the company is leaving a *lot* of money on the table. I wonder if the price of $50 is leaving too much of the market behind.

Has Omni hit that "sweet" spot at $50? I cannot say for sure. If this were a shareware application, I could test the app for a few weeks and determine whether OmniGraffle.iPad fit into my workflow. Under those circumstances, I might find it cheap at $50, but I cannot test that possibility.

Andy Ihnatko gave a magnificent on-air review of the iPad yesterday on MacBreak Weekly. On the show, when Alex Lindsay asked about OmniGraffle, Ihnatko admitted it was too pricey for his blood:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty6Hjs0NpDs>

Taking myself as another example, I am OmniGraffle's ideal market: affluent, design-minded, early adopter, a heavy user of OmniGraffle.app, the whole bag. One of the apps I was most excited about was OmniGraffle.iPad… until I heard that it was priced at $50. I can buy all three Apple iWork apps for that and still have money left over to buy dinner.

Don't get me wrong — OmniGroup's applications are of the very highest quality, and are worth a premium over other apps. I assume (though I cannot test) that OmniGraffle.iPad will be magnificent and will only get better as Omni becomes more familiar with the iPad's interface. But I can probably get 60% of its utility at 20% of its price by buying Keynote.iPad. With the money I save, I could probably upgrade to the next version of OmniGraffle for the Mac.

Best wishes,
Clint

On Apr 1, 2010, at 6:19 PM, Nic Olinsky wrote:

> It's a tough call. I don't know what it costs to port an application from Mac OS X to the iPhone/iPad platform, but I know the OmniGroup's resources aren't those of larger developers, so I am willing to pay the price and hope the functionality equals its OS X cousin.
> 
> On Apr 1, 2010, at 3:55 PM, Stephen Thomas wrote:
> 
>> As a longtime fan and heavy user of OmniGraffle Pro, I have to admit that the $50 price tag means I'm going to pass on the iPad version. And I say that even though I expect to end up using the iPad as my primary personal computer (replacing an iBook G4). I do know how useful OmniGraffle Pro can be, and I prefer using it on my current computer, but to be honest, most of my diagramming needs can be met just fine with the latest version of Keynote. Sure, about 50% of the time OG would be more convenient, and probably about 10% of the time what I want to do just won't be possible in Keynote, but for $50 I'll live with the inconvenience and a few frustrated artistic aspirations. Apple is probably setting an unreasonable pricing expectation with their $10 iWork apps (the Apple brand will help them make it up in volume; plus they're really using apps to drive hardware sales). Still, no more than about $20 seems right for an iPad version of OG. Wolfram Alpha's recent capitulation may be instructive here (though, in their case no more than $5 seems reasonable; interesting that they've gone all the way to $2). Of course, I'm still a big fan of the Omni Group (I own OmniGraffle, OmniPlan, OmniOutliner, and OmniGraphSketcher), and I hope they continue to be successful. At least for now, though, they'll have to do it without me on the iPad.
>> 
>> Stephen
>> 
>> 
>> On 2010 April 1, at 3:45 PM, Nic Olinsky wrote:
>> 
>>> wow, $50. any customer loyalty discount?