In this blog post on the Rogue Amoeba site, Paul posts about the recent move on the part of Newsgator in making NetNewsWire a free product.
Paul’s concern seems to be that this is a bad move for software developers, and that it’s going to make it hard for people to keep charging money for their products. I disagree, and I further assert that Newsgator’s not the competition here, Google Reader is. I’m not one to prefer online apps to offline ones, generally, but when I started using Google Reader, I realized anyone trying to make a living off desktop RSS clients is doomed. Now, I don’t disagree that the desktop RSS client market is doomed, but it’s not going to affect desktop software in general. I’d still far rather use MarsEdit to write blog posts with and use Flickr Uploader to work with getting my pictures to flickr. And forget about ever replacing iMovie or iTunes or TextMate, or any number of other client applications, with web versions. I don’t see it happening.
I think Paul is wrong about how many people use online RSS aggregators, I think it’s far higher than he thinks. And I think Google Reader is one Google App that actually makes sense. RSS Aggregation is one app that does make sense on the web. After all… you’re just reading articles that are generally a series of links or that you have to load the blog entry in a browser to read the full thing anyway. It’s built into the internet – why not the aggregators as well?
What are your thoughts? Do you think making a “probably already doomed but didn’t know it yet” product category like desktop RSS readers have to deal with someone giving theirs away was a bad thing? Or do you think the ability of anyone to keep selling these was in doubt for the future, as I do?
