Scorched earth
NewsGator, owners of Brent Simmons' NetNewsWire (NNW) today announced that they would no longer be charging for the RSS reader. The full app which would have cost you $30 yesterday now costs you nothing. Of course NewsGator would like you to sign up for their subscription service, but that doesn’t appear to be a mandatory condition of using the application. This decision effectively sounds the death knell for the commercial Mac RSS market. NNW has had an insurmountable lead in the market for as long as I’ve been developing RSS products for the Mac (since 2002 no less), but at least before it was possible to compete on some terms with this juggernaut by providing specialized features, a simplified interface or different metaphor. However between the free basic RSS readers such as Vienna and the full fledged NNW there really is no oxygen left in this already ridiculously crowded market.
Honestly I am a little bitter about this, what NewsGator has done is effectively anti-competitive, NNW has somewhere between 10 to 17% of the entire RSS market (that’s across all platforms) and probably 70% or more of the Mac share (I’ve not been able to dig up any conclusive figures on this however). To suddenly make that product free is obviously going to decimate the competition. It’s hard to compete with a product that’s as well known and frankly as good as NNW, it’s damn near impossible to compete with it when it’s free. I’d love to be proven wrong, but as we’ve seen before, when a product in a near monopoly position and gets an unfair advantage over its competitors it tends to lay waste to all around it.
You might say Safari RSS is free, or Vienna is free, those products haven’t killed the Mac RSS market. It’s true they haven’t, though of course they’ve taken their share of customers away from the commercial RSS developers’. Still neither of those products is even remotely as mature, polished or comprehensive as NNW. To give you an example in a more widely understood market, making Nisus Writer or Pages free tomorrow wouldn’t do much to dent Microsoft’s dominance of the word processor market. Microsoft making Word free on the other hand would have a very big impact on all the developers producing 3rd-party word processors.
How this impacts NewsLife
I’m not discontinuing NewsLife, I’ll say that right off the bat - I designed NewsLife to be my ideal news reader and obviously that isn’t NNW or I’d have given up long ago and switched to that. From a business perspective I would like it to pay for its development however, so I’ll be watching sales closely to see what happens. The market NewsLife is aimed at differs from NNW’s, but even so I’m expecting a negative impact. I hope you’ll continue to support independent Mac developers and look at all the alternatives available and not let ‘free’ be the deciding factor in your software choices, as hard as that can be.
posted by Rory Prior @ 8:07 PM
23 comments
23 Comments:
From what NewsGator said this seems more about using the client apps to draw people to NewsGator's online products, my guess is that this decision is all about what's happening on the web.
Google Reader seems to be is completely taking over that space. Makes sense as most people already have a Google or Gmail account of some description. Competitors to Google must need compelling reasons to get people using their service. Making the client apps free extends the web concept to the desktop, most likely in the hope of capturing those that don't like web software. Makes you wonder just what's happening at NewsGator.
I'd say to see how it goes; there are plenty of reasons why people wouldn't buy my Feeder app, but it keeps selling. NewsLife is original, attractive and has a low price. Hopefully people know they can import those OPML files when trying it out. :)
Yeah I understand it's to draw more people into their online services. The thing is they could have done this in a way that wasn't anti-competitive. For example giving away NNW but requiring you to sign up for a NewsGator account to use it. As it is that part is optional but the app is free either way which obviously hurts developers in the RSS space.
I can easily see how you could get the wind knocked out of you by an announcement like this. But I am not sure any of us understands the market dynamics enough to pass judgment on whether this will positive or negative for other developers on the Mac.
Frankly, in my day to day encounters, it's Google Reader that is drawing the most new users. It seems to even be drawing customers away from NetNewsWire, in some instances. So in a very real sense, I think in the RSS market, "free" was already a very real competitor.
On the bright side of things, the market for the "premium paid newsreader" on the Mac is now wide open. It's possible that the increased visibility for RSS in general that this will hopefully contribute to, wll help to bring more people into the market for specialized news readers such as yours.
Free was already a real competitor that's certainly true, Vienna for example is a good general purpose free reader that everyone loves to cite when ever a paid RSS reader gets a mention *anywhere* (heck I'm guilty of it now). I tend to draw a distinction between free web applications and desktop products though, I'm sure Google Reader and other online services are eating into parts of the desktop RSS market, but I still think there is room for both to coexist. Desktop apps can offer a better experience and I don't see that changing for a few years at least.
I really don't think there is a market for a premium paid RSS reader, the market has been saturated with RSS readers for awhile now anyway (yet they still keep coming).
Rory, you can certainly be forgiven for feeling a bit bitter about this. you and Paul at Rogue Amoeba make some excellent points.
i paid for NNW early on, well before i had heard about NewsLife. fortunately you also make one of the best Mac web gallery programs out there, one that i always refer people to. i've tried the free alternatives and they don't come close in usability, but they do have some nice features. perhaps this is an opportunity to focus more on making InstantGallery the best ever.
Thanks for your support, I am hard at work on InstantGallery 2, the beta should be out this month!
I'm a user who just switched to NNW because it went free, but my switch wasn't as simple as that.
The first RSS reader I used was Safari RSS. With Safari, I finally understood how useful RSS feeds are, but very quickly out grew Safari's simple offerings.
I then tried out as many OS X RSS readers as I could. I ended up settling on Newsfire for a number of reasons, but mostly because of its user interface (both looks and usability). Newsfire worked great for me, and I'd still be using it today if I hadn't gotten an iPhone.
Once I got an iPhone, I started doing a lot of my web surfing in Mobile Safari just because it was so convenient. However, I very quickly missed having access to an RSS reader.
When I discovered that Google Reader had an iPhone interface, I dumped Newsfire right away. Having my feeds synced on my Mac and my iPhone is great, and it saves me a ton of time. However, I've never really been happy with the web interface. I just prefer a native interface.
I was aware that NNW offered an iPhone interface and synced your feeds, but because I'm in grad school, I couldn't justify shelling out for another RSS reader, especially when Google Reader did a good enough job. Once I got the news that NNW was free, I switched right away.
That doesn't mean I'll stick with NNW forever though. While I really enjoy NNW, I'm not such a fan of NewsGator's iPhone interface. If something came along that I felt was better, I'd happily switch, even if I had to shell out some money.
Newsgator have certainly made it hard for any other shareware rss apps to do well but i dont think they have done anything wrong. There will still be people who will pay for rss readers so if you can make a product that has something extra then there is no reason you can't be successful.
Personally im just glad to see another really high quality freeware app. It may hurt a small segment of the shareware community but its good for consumers which is more important then anything else in my opinion.
Hey Rory,
I'm not a customer, although that will likely change in the future - I really support what you have contributed to the indie dev scene.
This isn't a feature request, just a thought - seeing as much of the appeal of NNW is the NewsGator online interface, and Google Reader is drawing so many new users, what about implementing a syncing mechanism with Google Reader? Sure, there's not a supported API, *yet* :), but some have already worked around that:
http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2005/12/google-api-feeds.html. There's also an unofficial Google Reader Notifier menubar app. Or even, *gulp*, syncing with NewsGator, which does have an official API (http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/api/)?
Again, this isn't criticism, but if it comes down to possibly discontinuing NewsLife, maybe it would be something to consider?
For me, attacking NNW for going free is a bit, well. . . Ridiculous. Vienna has the same features as NNW, in my side-by-side testing. Why not attack both for "degrading" the Mac development market?
What's obvious to me is that this is response to growing market share of (free) web-based readers and aggregators like Google Reader, News Hutch, Yahoo, PageFlakes, etc.
Additionaly, after trying NNW for about a week, I don't see any benefit over Google or Newshutch: The only feature that NNW that these other do not, is the ability to archive feeds in HTML. For my purposes, flagging an article is enough of an "archive", as I do not need to maintain hundreds of artcles from all my feeds forever. I just need to save select items.
you have my sympathies, but your analysis ignores Google Reader, which would eventually crush a NetNewswire that costs money. I switched from NNW to GR not because the latter is free but because it's superior (especially on my iPhone).
To be honest, because you said you will wait and see how your sell goes before making decision, I will ... wait and not purchase it for now. Who know? you might make it free tomorrow :)
I think the point is that, in today world, it's not the software itself that is valuable to the user. Software will just be the medium to deliver service to users. If the decision giving its product free of Newsgator going to have any negative impact on the RSS reader market, it is because of their sync service that they offer across their products (i.e. I don't want to read one news twice in my PC and then in my PowerBook).
From the way I see it, if any other product want to compete with Newsgator's solution and still want to charge for their software, they must firstly provide a service at least similar to that of Newgator. Then if their software is designed better than Newsgator's, they will still be able to take over the market (even to charge money for the service)
Well, this shows why it's good that you publish more than one application. It looks like independant Mac developers have to be a little paranoid to survive.
If sales disapear, don't waste time on this; just write something else. You sure have th chops to pull it off ;)
- Nick -
Anonymous wrote:
You have my sympathies, but your analysis ignores Google Reader, which would eventually crush a NetNewswire that costs money. I switched from NNW to GR not because the latter is free but because it's superior (especially on my iPhone).
I do ignore Google Reader because it's not a desktop app, simple as that. Jumping ship from the desktop app market to the web service market is shrinking the RSS market (assuming a new person doesn't start using a desktop reader), but that doesn't fundamentally change the relationship between the competing desktop applications.
Once the iPhone API comes out you'll see RSS readers for the iPhone that kick the ass of any web interface provided by Google or anyone else.
fernando said...
For me, attacking NNW for going free is a bit, well. . . Ridiculous. Vienna has the same features as NNW, in my side-by-side testing. Why not attack both for "degrading" the Mac development market?
Perhaps you didn't read the bit where I said NNW has an overwhelming amount of market share compared to all its competitors which of course includes Vienna? Vienna is much easier to compete with than NetNewsWire, because like most open source software it's not very pretty and not very innovative. I don't want to knock the Vienna guys because I'm sure it's a sound product, but it's not exactly doing anything new and exciting - it's another 3 pane RSS reader.
Well, it is... understandably irritating from your point of view, I think we just got to ride out these market forces ands see what happens.
When I first got a mac a year ago I tried just about every feed reader available, as I take my RSS pretty seriously... I don't like using webapps when I can have software, and I've bought a great deal from indie developers (probably too much!). NNW won out and got my cash for a number of reasons, but the big one was mobility.
With it and NewsGator I could sync my feeds with my laptop and desktop. I could read them in a browser if I was somewhere else. And later on, I could read them easily on my iPhone.
Earlier this month my NewsGator account expired, and I wasn't planning on renewing... I could sync my feeds through .Mac or my own server easily enough. I wasn't thrilled about this - neither of htose options work as quickly or reliably as the NewsGator sync... but, the syncing and the inline browsing and easy "key" interface made me a fan of NNW.
Why am I sharing all this? It's about one feature. Free or paid, I was into one feature that knocked over all the competition. Others may have had something similar, but then the fact that NNW is a mature, smooth running app won out.
So will it effect a lot? Perhaps. Mac users are used to paying for software from indie developers despite the often free, but not so great alternatives. But most of us, in the end, are pragmatists and not idealogues. Give us a good reason to switch, and we will.
Hum... NetNewsWire is the only option for me. Bloglines is the only web feed reader that I can stand, but the only desktop app that syncs with it is NNW.
While we're on the subject, do you not even get one percent from Bloglines?
I don't understand why any small software company would attempt to compete in a crowded 'commodity' market such as RSS readers. Similarly for GTD, TODO list, back-up and other applications. It is only a matter of time before one of your competitors gives away your product for free or it gets incorporated into the OS. Maybe it wasn't a commodity market when you started out?
RSS was a niche market when I entered it, it arguably still is although it's grown a lot in the last couple of years. I don't really accept the argument that just because a particular market is crowded that means it's not worth attempting to compete in it however. We'd never get any new software if that were the case. There are some excellent commercial word processors for the Mac yet there are free alternatives and the behemoth that is Microsoft Word - they can get along just fine it seems. Of course if Word were suddenly to be made free it would decimate those markets, that's arguably the kind of situation we have here with NNW becoming free.
I would contact the Mac magazines and give them your side of the story. Make a big deal on your website about how you won't be collecting any use data ("is your privacy worth $x?"). This could be a big publicity opportunity for you. Read up on Ben & Jerry's vs Hagen Daaz and see how B&Js turned a bad situation into millions of pounds of free PR.
Just my 2p worth...
Quit yer bellyachin'. That is not the American Way :-)
Going free is a sign of weakness - exploit it.
Look again at your value proposition. Print it out in big type and stick it on your wall. Is there a line in there about costing less than NNW? Didn't think so.
If you need to sharpen it - do. Publish a new release with a killer benefit and crow from the rooftops - RSS that's more than worth the asking price!
But don't whine. Jeez, you sound like Detroit..
To be honest, I dumped NNW while it was shareware (yes, I did pay for it) for Google Reader and I am quite happier.
NNW just couldn't cope with the amount of feed I was skimming through and usually took about a minute to start on my poor G5.
I used NL, switched to Google Reader, and then switched back to NL. People are finicky, Just because something is free doesn't mean it will be used over a priced product. Some people pay for Omni's web browser; some people will pay for your app. Be patient and keep up the good work. I admire your sense of style in interface design.
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