The high price tag is probably the primary reason that he's not selling many of these things; I know plenty of devs that successfully sell simple games at the $1 level, and they are able to sell tons of them as long as the product is good (20 or 30 thousand is not unheard of, even if you're not a huge success). A couple hundred purchases means that you made some serious mistakes either in pricing or promotion.

I disagree. Now, I haven't released any games on the store, but I've released three different applications. On one of our apps, we raised the price to $6.99 from $0.99 since it was a niche product. We now are selling 1/2 as many as we were before, but the 7x increase in price more than makes up for the difference.

The key phrase you have is "as long as the product is good." The problem is that the App Store itself is no longer a viable marketing channel, since there is so much competition. You have to be in the top 50 of a category to get any traction. The indie devs are having difficulty getting noticed in all the clutter, and a "few hundred downloads" is about on par with what I am expecting for each app we release.

Maybe eventually we will release an app that catches fire, but I'm holding expectations at the few hundred mark for now.

Technical debt builds up, and having a bunch of ActiveX apps around means you are accruing a shitload of that debt each day. 5 years ago, when 95% of the world used Windows and IE, it was still a dumb idea to build an app that used ActiveX.

Kill it, MS. Please!

You actually want Best Buy to go out of business? You want thousands of teenagers, not to mention thousands of really smart people that work at HQ, out of work? Wow. It's not like they are forcing you to shop there or somehow lowering your quality of life. Some people actually enjoy shopping there. (I'm not a huge fan, personally, but I really don't enjoy watching American businesses crumble and thousands of normal people losing their jobs.)

4 gig cards are not that expensive and they hold an amazing amount of stuff. Probably 8 gig cards will be pretty standard in a year or two. So just get the largest cards you can afford and you won't need to have lots of extra ones lying around.

The downside to doing this is that you put all of your eggs in one basket. If that card is lost or fails before you back up the images, you will lose way too many photos. For a pro photographer, that is probably unacceptable risk.

For casual photographers, though, buying the biggest card you can does make sense.

Noone demanded something like the iPhone.

That's not entirely true. I recall many blogs and other places asking for iPod functionality in a cellular phone, so they only needed one device.

The problem is, Motorola listened, and we ended up with the P.O.S. that was called 'ROKR'.

Apple knew the right way to execute on that promise, and delivered the iPhone.

Freedom isn't free.

Yes, you're absolutely right. Freedom costs $1.05.

Yeah, but that's the gift that keeps on giving all year!