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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

The post is a discussion of why I'm moving from desktop apps to web apps.

That is less consequential at HN than elsewhere, since most of the community here already is in web apps. However, even if you'll never touch desktop software, you may find the points about AdWords and conversion math worth your while. (They're about halfway down.) The short story is that anything you do to increase your conversion rate has a side effect of increasing your ability to win the AdWords "auction", which means you get additional benefit (increased volume) above and beyond the base increase in conversion.

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The section on "Phone Home vs. Google Analytics" is something I have been pondering for long time. I hack on the Arora browser. Now if I had Arora report back with what actions user use (File/Quit etc) I could answer questions like: Does anyone ever use View/Source or do they all just open the Inspector? But even though people are using a Browser I think they will still complain that it is reporting something back to a server which is exactly what every single webpage they go to does, but somehow it is bad because it is from the desktop app and not the webpage in the desktop app.

"I think they will still complain"

Why not test your assumptions by trying it on a subset of your users?

No, it is not "bad" because it is from a desktop app, it is bad because desktop apps generally do not tell the user if and when they send information to a remote server.

How about collecting those statistics locally and asking the user every couple of days if he would be okay with sending them to a server, mentioning the reasons for doing so? I think if users had the control over that they wouldn't generally mind doing so.

> But even though people are using a Browser I think they will still complain that it is reporting something back to a server

Not necessarily. The Office User Experience program has been very successful, and that's exactly what it does. Just open a little windows at the 3rd or 4th startup of the software (not the first) telling the user you'd like to make his experience better blah blah blah and to that end you'd like to collect a bit o' anonymous and non-personally identifying data (you can add a "view more" where you say which bits o' data you collect precisely) and would they be ok with that. And give the user a way to enable/disable it post-facto if they change their mind.

Yes, I think this is the right way to do it. Users usually aren't opposed to sending developers data to improve the product, so long as they explicitly okay it.

I'd go a little further and have the application collect data and store it locally. When it has enough data, it pops up a dialog asking if the user would consent to sending anonymous data to help improve the software. If they choose to participate, it sends the data it has collected locally at that time and that time only (until the next major upgrade). If they choose not to, it deletes the collected data and never bothers them again.

Mozilla are doing something similar with their Test Pilot project:

     http://labs.mozilla.com/blog/2008/03/introducing-test-pilot/

For privacy reasons, participation is voluntary, but they're promoting it as an easy way for people who don't know how to program and don't have the time to triage bugs to participate in the Firefox project.

I switched an app I'm working on from a desktop app to a web app after doing a similar analysis.

You also scratched at something that played a huge part in my decision: monthly subscription fees are a lot better (in terms of both recurring revenue and feature bloat) than an upgrade treadmill.

It's great to see empirical evidence (from the same app, no less!) that it makes sense to do so.

Oh, believe me, my next app will most certainly have a built-in recurring revenue component. I convinced 2,000 people to pay me money -- if a fraction of them were paying me even $5 a month...

Great article! I have been recently wrestling over the decision of whether to write my next application first as an installable version or as a web app. All of my experience, and my gut instinct, is to do the web app first but I just couldn't set that decision in stone, maybe now I can.

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