A few weeks ago, Fluxiom was to me a beautiful video on a definitely Web 2.0 site. Gray backdrop, light greens and gorgeous design were announcing an application I had absolutely no interest in but that, from the previews and the author’s previous portfolio, seemed like it could kick ass - provided you need it, of course.
It turns out Fluxiom launched a few days ago. I didn’t get an account but I still would like to make a case for it. Here’s why.
All over the web I am seeing comments on how expensive Fluxiom is, based on the fallacious argument that “storage is cheap”. I’m sorry to disappoint many people but storage isn’t cheap — at least good storage isn’t. Amazon indeed set a record a while ago by offering extremely cheap storage with little administrative overhead. With no interface and access through web calls exclusively, it is useless to most people. In that, Amazon’s storage price essentially fits in a business-to-business structure or, in more casual words, business-to-geek.
It is a sad fact of life that just about every thing we use in our life is cheap, even luxury goods. Let’s take an O’Reilly book, for example. It’s made of paper, glue and ink, three components that are neither new nor expensive. So why is O’Reilly charging the public $40 a pop? And more importantly, why is the public buying O’Reilly books?
The answer is pretty simple: we, the public, don’t pay for the raw material but rather for the invisible things that make the book useful to us. The authors, the editors, the delivery guy who ships the book from the warehouse to our local bookstore, the toaster the delivery guy uses to eat breakfast every morning. In other words, the gazillion little details that seem completely unrelated to the good we buy but that, in the end, are pre-requisite to its existence.
Now, as I said, I don’t know Fluxiom. But I know it enough to know it required development and design work, it required servers, it required running a business. Like any product, Fluxiom is not storage, even if it is a storage-centered application. 9 euros per month seems exceedingly cheap to me in itself when it comes to rewarding the work of a team of designers, developers, server administrators, network center maintenance staff, etc…
Prices do drop around us and economies of scale do exist. But we shall not be led to believe things should be cheap. Some things are cheap, some aren’t. Think of the jam producers.
FJdK said:
Amazon indeed set a record a while ago by offering extremely cheap storage at a very low price
As opposed to extremely cheap storage at a very high price? ;)
Ken,
LOL! Good catch, I have corrected it!
FJ
9 euros per month seems exceedingly cheap to me in itself when it comes to rewarding the work of a team of designers, developers, server administrators, network center maintenance staff, etc...
That sentence makes no sense to me. You don't look at a price in isolation. You look at what one gets for 9 euros. It's apparently not worth 9 euros to you, why would you blithely claim it's worth 9 euros to others (i.e., claim that it is "exceedingly cheap").
Storage is cheap. Bandwidth is cheap. While the up-front cost to develop fluxiom may have been expensive, the incremental cost to provide every account issued is cheap. People are not wrong to make such considerations.
And finally, the issue of rewarding people isn't an issue either; we aren't benefactors; we are customers. The question is if all this design, "gorgous" as you call it, justifies the cost. It sounds like many people are concluding that it's not worth it.
Bob,
The reason I am here comparing price in an absolute fashion in my conclusion is that the posts I am commenting on through this entry do the same - "storage is cheap". Applying the same arbitrary logic, 9 euros seems to me very reasonable. When weighting in the features, storage and development time, it seems even more so to me.
As far as Fluxiom "not being worth 9 euros to me", it is not indeed. But it wouldn't even be of interest to me as a free application as I currently do not have any need for hosted asset management software. Note I am not claiming it should be worth nine euros to others here as we all have our perception of price. I am just saying that it seems well worth that price to me provided I were interested in such a service.
You are right in pointing out we are customers. But we are all also service providers (to someone) and we should keep in mind that the people who provide services to us are in the same position as we are, simply in a different place in the chain. What I mean by rewarding work here is providing a group with enough funding to continue operating the service that we want to use, not benefiting people out of benevolence.
The question, to me, is more than design, unless of course you call an entire interface "design". I know of many services that make my eyes bleed (among which some of the most critically acclaimed Web 2 applications) but their features justify their price.
I hope this answers your question,
FJ