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Quote Pete Kaine:

So all the small talented developers undersell themselves and go out of business because they can't compete with the giants and their big budget adverts. It then get's to the point where no one can compete with the established No.1 in the market place and they give up. Long term that firm sits on it's hands and then fails to increase development and it leads to the stagnetation of the market place as it then fails to develop.

.... nations fall, earthquakes, mass hysteria!

I get all of that i do. I'm not trying to make some kind of point here or win anyone over to anything. I'm looking at iPad apps and thinking geez, these are good, these are fabulously priced, people are buying, people are making money from their products. It's funny how i am now more likely to be able to make money by selling an app that will play my album rather than selling the album itself.

You mention indie games - through Steam i've spent a few quid on indie games some of which are amazing. I never would have done that without the Steam delivery system and i never would have heard about them without browsing through their library and trying some demos. I imagine that Steam has revitalised the fortunes of a few indie programmers. And i'd rather pay a fiver for something real than waste half a day searching for a bittorrent or crack somewhere and go through the potential horror of downloading something nasty etc etc. iTunes also shows that there's a section of the market who dont want to fanny about finding cracks and free downloads, they just want the real thing and dont mind paying a few quid for it.

So... some people pay, some don't, but what i've seen is that far more people are happy to pay a quid for a simple add-on to their phone than i would have believed. The success of the app store came from nowhere - it's a completely new market, a new stream of revenue that simply didnt exist before except perhaps in ringtones - and who would have believed people would pay for that? But they do.

Quote Pete Kaine:

Back to your point above about Miroslav Orchestra. What about the users who want to buy that software and not some £3.99 budget guitar rig. If IK tomorrow turned into a company that wrote nothing but guitar amp sims for the iphone because it made them a load of money, that would put more speclist products like Miroslav on the back burning or in the bin as it does take the time and money to develop. Do we really want that?

I dont think so but i dont think music software is developed purely from a business point of view - the same as a hand built guitar is not about the money, it's about the craftmanship. I would say that the iRig is going to enable IK to create even more fabulous things because they have a new revenue stream to fund it.

The cloud stuff - nice idea but as i dont even have a mobile phone reception in my village i doubt the viability of a flawless network available everywhere to enable me to use my dumb terminal. Same with email - i like it local to my machine - but that's just me, for the average user i'm sure they'd love it.

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