satukubik

Yesterday I saw a mac application bundle promotion from MacUpdate. This is a time-limited sale which includes 10 Mac applications. As you can see in the homepage of the promotion, they are Graphic Converter, Fetch, SRS iWOW, Cocktail, ProfCast, Amadeus Pro, and GarageSale. But that just the beginning. When the number of sales went over 2500, they added Little Snitch. It didn’t stop there, at 3800 they added Intaglio, and at 5999 they added TechToolPro. And as soon as this happen, they also added Photo Presenter which never be announced before at all. This makes an eleven application bundle worth over 400 dollar. And they sell this bundle for only $49. This is quite an amazing story, isn’t it?

I thought over this promotion. Why such promotion is only for a Mac software? I believe this should also work in Windows community. And for a saving of over 80%, I believe many users will at least take a look at the promotion. If you sell a bundle of WinRAR, WinAmp, Total Commander, and 7 other great applications for $50, I believe many Windows user will not hesitate to buy it. This can significantly reduce the use of illegal software and in the same time, thickened developers’ wallet.

I can think of several reason why this can’t work in Windows world thought…

1. Windows users are not as rich as Mac users. This might be true, but the number of them is also bigger so it should still works nevertheless.
2. Windows users don’t care to the developers. They might not really love the application, just that they need it. Mac users seem to be really happy with their application and love to pay the developers because of that.
3. Windows communities are not as strong as Apple. The power of being minority is you get stronger community.
4. Windows users are just love illegal software. Hmmm….

I still hope there is a crazy man out there who will try to bundle Windows applications like MacUpdate does and maybe we can see if this is working or not.

If you’re interested but don’t know how, this is the explanation.

The promotion organizer talked to some developers about including their application in the bundle and also the compensation they will get. This is usually fixed but the organizer in the first mac bundle application was just too happy with the number of sales he doubled the developers’ reward (Oh yeah… I forget that this kind of promotion has been held two times including this one, and the organizer of the first promotion is MacHeist). And then they sold it in a website with fixed time scheme. This left big amount of money for the organizer but from what I read, developers were just don’t care about it since they also got pretty big amount of money.

In my opinion, the reason why these promotions are very succesful is because the organizer always do something unexpected for the promotion. For example, in the first promotion, the organizer lowered the number to unlock TextMate, and this boosted the number of sales over the original lock number. The second promotion has more surprise. They also lowered the unlock number, and they also add Photo Presenter to the bundle after the last lock is achieved, … and they also extend the promotion for three days (yess… it’s still running now), …. and who knows… they might add more surprise later (I certainly hope so…).

And to add the surprise, MacHeist (the first bundle organizer) joins the crowd and adds four more application and two early access to a beta applications for they who buy the bundle from their site. This makes the original value of the bundle is $531.67. Customer loves surprise and many of them eat it. The current number of buyer is over 6000 people.

If you are an Mac user, do you buy the bundle?

Disclaimer: I don’t have any affiliation to the promotion nor get any advantage for writing this article