Comment by Entlin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Entlin | Hacker News Reader

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I agree. Here's a crazy idea: App creators are limiting themselves. They don't think in the big picture. They play it save. All because previous App denials have made it terribly expensive to create something and then be shut down at the last step.

Where is the next Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, Hypercard, Eclipse, XCode, Visual Studio, browser extensible with plugins like Firefox, vmware, Bittorrent, Protools, Cubase, Live, Avid, FCP, Maya, Blender, Max, Aftereffects or Dreamweaver?

Well, quite a few of them have been actively banned by Apple.

I haven't seen any really complex new Apps for the iPad, where somebody invested heavily. Games don't count, they are very rarely killed by Apple. Ports don't count neither, there is less investment there.

Where are the big investments?

I've seen 5 so far: Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Garageband, and TheDaily. 4 from Apple and 1 from Murdoch, created with the personal guarantee by Murdoch's buddy Jobs that it will reach customers.

Could somebody comment? Are there app creators that indeed play it save? Are there others that are investing big time and have just not reached their 1.0 yet?

Well, a few people are working on Powerpoint replacements.

But the problem with the complex set you show is that those kinds of applications can take millions of dollars to get to a point where they can compete.

I have a great idea of how to take Excel down, for example. However, when I tallied up the hours it would take just to get to an MVP, it was far out of my range, and far out of three people unless we locked ourselves in a room for a year. To get to an MVP. To compete with something that many businesses get with Word.

You can't beat Excel from the bottom up, because LibreOffice already has that world. The key in that world, I believe, is to attack at the top. Big excel spreadsheets are a nightmare to handle. There's no good way to version control. VBA is easy to turn into spaghetti code. It's expensive to develop ways to see your business intelligence data, whether by packages such as Xcelcius or custom solutions taking a developer's time.

It's the wrong arena to compete on price, but you need a large subset of Excel's features to get to the point where you can tackle that fish.

Or, you can try to make a hit in the app world to prove you have the chops so you can get investment for your bigger ideas.

http://www.photographybay.com/2011/03/30/photoshop-for-ipad-...

I expect this to be based on Adobe Air, though. That makes it a multi-platform investment. Also, I am not sure this is 'big time' for Adobe.

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