Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Previously I have been quite heavily invested in the The Desktop App Will Never Die camp. Based on my experiences in the last month from selling, essentially, the same application on the desktop and on the web... I think I owe PG an apology for doubting him.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=503959

There is still a space for users of desktop apps. I know many of my users love the permanence/physicality/"realness" of it. (So much so, in fact, that a third of the ones who use it online pay extra to get a backup of the desktop application on a CD.)

I just am having a hard time making the numbers work for being a developer of them.

I'm in a sort of unique position where I can split test very similar people into the desktop or online versions of my software. I get more clicks on ads for the online version. It is easier to get them to sign up for the online version than it is to download. It is easier to contact them about the online version. It is even fractionally easier to get them to pay for it (!).

I'm sort of obsessive compulsive about tracking support emails. They're running 30:2 in favor of the desktop app since I launched the online version. Sales run 50-50... and that number is starting to heavily favor the online version as I see the higher ROI it gets and promote accordingly.

I was a skeptic. Reality is making me a believer.

There will always be some desktop applications which doesn't make a ton of sense (either logically or financially) to port them to the web.

For most other type of applications, we already have web equivalents (so coyly termed as "the lite version" in some cases).

Javascript may be the most awful language to write code in. But, if there are users (and a way to make money), you'll always find developers willing to write code in JS.

Javascript is not the most awful, it is the most misunderstood :)

Javascript is actually a quite good language: it has a dynamic object model and real closures. It has its deficencies, of course (like scoping rules).

It's really bad if you prefer statically typed languages, though, because on the client side on the web you have no other choice for the moment. Probably in the future we will see language implementations that use js as a target language become more mature and widespread.

GWT already offers static typing.

I recently added a runtime type checker (for method args/return values) to Objective-J, and intend on adding optional static typing at some point.

It is very, very interesting to see someone in a position to essentially A/B test sales of the same app online and on the desktop. Thanks for the data.

I am a bit less surprised when I checked the site and noticed that you don't seem to have a subscription model, but rather a one time fee. Am I missing something, and if not--are your worried about the lifetime cost of a customer being higher than the one-time sale revenue?

I don't usually see webapps for a fixed fee, so I was curious.

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