[General Topics] quicksite:
The Historic Moment, for Windows to get it right for next 10-20 years

Hi Chainfire, in my post, actually, I was not intending to criticize your discovery nor your recommended solution to Microsoft. What probably wasn't clear is that I was using your general subject matter of locking, unlocking, piracy protection as a point of departure to raise the related issue of really bad, sometimes dysfunctional, transactional design & overall user experience design which "the good guys*" (purchasers) have to face just to get the product they purchased onto their phones!

No, that's just it, I completely concur. There's a very complicated psychological behavioral dynamic at work when, on the one hand, here at XDA-developers, you have first-rate mobile application developers creating & enhancing specialty, targeted apps for free --- as the intended spirit of the site community -- and on the other hand there exists the normal marketplace of buying & selling goods where any of the following scenarios can be found:

(a) really great apps that are top-of-the-line, thoroughly professionally designed & engineered solutions to problems (or enhancements to work & life), which are priced in a range that buyers think is fair trade for the excellence in utility they are buying.

I'll just use Resco Picture Viewer -- which I just purchased last week -- but still don't have working on my phone, having nothing to do with any flaw or design gap from the application developers, but rather from the terrible transaction & usability design of PocketGear, the distributor using some clunky, unfit-for-real-world-usage process that perhaps worked in theory on paper but is pathetically "not ready for prime time".

What made this app rise above the threshold of free apps -- GREAT free apps developed and distributed here at XDA, namely s2v "Slide to View" by a really great developer, A_C? All I can say is that every aspect of Resco's user experience design, the navigation system, the functions themselves, and the total landscape of considerations they worked through to bring improved value to other finger-friendly photo viewers not only saved me time with the persistent problems associated with viewing, evaluating & assigning images to things like Today Screens, Slide2Unlock screens, Phone Contact pictures, icon selections for app-launchers like Androkkid and iFonz, etc, but also accomplished this with a very intuitive, 100% finger-controllable user interface. It was a no-brainer: Buy this app as a central pillar of a suite if functions I use everyday on my touchscreen device.

(b) apps that are MARKETED as top-of-the-line, thoroughly professionally designed & engineered solutions, but don't seem to deliver enhanced value in proportion to their price:

Example: Kinoma Media Player

Maybe I am alone in this but I tried every which way but loose to get that thing to just install and work on my phone, but it wanted to start pushing product at me. So, in this case, I had already purchased PocketPlayer -- a great multi-media player -- but more important had begin to use the newly developed finger-nav music player developed by XDA's microfi -- "Nitrogen" -- and was blown away by its ease of use, small footprint, and finger-controlled UI. Then I had CorePlayer, and YouTube Player, so, for me only, others may differ, there was no special value to this product -- and i feel it overpriced for what it allegedly does.

(c) apps or utilities that do in fact solve an annoying problem or manage to making something ordinarily difficult suddenly easy, which I would really LOVE to buy -- but to me they are priced completely wrong in the psychological evaluation space in my head -- where I'm weighing cost/benefit. I'm going to make this statement which may be controversial but I will nevertheless make it:

These apps piss me off for being so steeply priced, so much so that I would have no problem with my conscience if someone said "hey you want to get xyz app for free?"... My answer, without the slightest hesitation: "F* yeah".

Trust me I understand and participate in product development cycles, and I so I surely get the concept that the cost to bring something seemingly simple to market in reality could be high in resource time and costs... and thus the "need" to price the utility accordingly, to enable a profit.

But I think it is exactly here where we've had a sea change due to Apple's innovation, first in the way their phone reinvented the basic user experience design, and second in their figuring out a simple way to sell apps to mainstream people, and deliver them fast and in uncomplicated ways -- as they previously mastered with itunes. MASS MARKET selling based on volume, and a pricing scheme that was in sync with consumer price tolerance, and more "no brainers" that it was way easier and cheaper in terms of TIME alone, to go buy the thing you want vs try to pawn a copy off your buddy.

It is in this complex swamp that I think the really professional Windows Mobile developers need to completely step back from their operating assumptions of the past 5years+, and see the world as it has changed. OR - get priced out of the narketplace.

People will pay for quality (at least some people will), but they won't pay for minimal 1-trick-pony applets that are way overpriced in the overall scheme of the marketplace. I suspect a lot of people will NOT learn this lesson, and will behave more like the obnoxious Music Recording Industry of America, whose solution to mp3 downloads was to try to kill the behavior with lawsuits, and force-feed people to buy CD's -- their tried & true way. That hubris and delusion left them fighting and fighting an inevitable chnage in consumer buying practices and delivery systems. While they fought in courts, Apple wisely looked and reversed the scenario, asking: "how could we make it such that people who have made pirate-downloading a normal everyday practice for which they have very little concern for the fairness of it all -- and flip it in a way that changes the pricing structure AND delivery method of music -- thus generating revenue again... by making it easier to buy the product as a no-brainer vs spending lot of time trying to beat the system and find it free elsewhere.

This is the crossroads I see longtime Windows Mobile app developers facing: innovate, or get bulldozed by changing marketplace behaviors that simply cannot be force-fed back inot the fairness bottle.

But I am in complete agreement with you... I just leapfrogged off your security flaw discovery, and your resulting basic question for Microsoft: "will you guys please get your s*** together and cooperate at this unprecedented time -- before the system is fully in place -- in making a workable system that brings everyone (or almost everyone) onboard?

I can't be emphatic enough: I agree with you completely. .. My whole springboard "beef" was in the (a) totally inconsistent methods of getting purchased products onto our phones, and (b) often broken systems to do this careful authentication and prevention of piracy measures, and (c) the opportunity for CONSUMERS, through a portal store like Windows Marketplace, to get this damn annoying problem solved.

I've already written too much, as I always do, but I just have to say I didn't grasp the car key analogy because I missed the key(!) concept:

Show me, in a use case scenario, how it is that we all get same car keys. I grasp what you're getting at, and appreciate an analogy, but I failed at comprehending that premise.

Great dialogue! thank you!