The Touchpad firestorm sale that HP has started has also caused an unseen
consequence on their software sales. From reading the posts at PreCentral, there
is more traffic on their site and software then ever before. In the article:
"The accidental userbase", software developers are seeing as much as 70% more
sales!

But lets look at this for a second, we all know these sales are because the
Touchpad is $100.00 right now (16BG model), instead of $499.00 where it first
started. You cannot find one really, if there is a store that has one, they will
be gone in ten minutes. This is telling me people wanted the Touchpad but the
price point was too high.

But what will happen in two weeks after all the Touchpads are gone and all the
new users have had their full of apps? No one knows actually, but what happens
if in two months people are still buying programs? Does this mean there is a
base of active users that are growing the WebOS environment? I believe it does.

This got me thinking then, what would happen if Mensys sold eCS for $25.00 a
copy? If anyone of you read OSNews days after eCS 2.0 was announced, many, many
people were interested in buying the OS, but not for $127.00. I can't blame them
actually, I look at it this way, I like the Haiku OS but I would never buy it
for $127.00, actually not for $50.00. Not because I am not interested, but the
value is hard to justify if you are going to use it as a hobby OS. Now for
$25.00, that makes me pause for a few minutes and possibly buy it, this is
because anything at $25.00 or lower can be considered an impulse buy with no or
almost no buyers remorse.

What if though, Mensys, tried this out, possibly making a version 2.5 of eCS and
testing out the waters with $25.00 per copy, and you only get one copy, not 5
copies like now?

So the math would be that every five people would equal one sale. Normally, you
don't want this, if you can sell one product of $127.00 and deal with one
person, you surely want to do this over $25.00 for five people and have to deal
with five...well people. But with eCS this is different, because we are trying
to grow the user-base, because this will be the only way our community can
survive in the long run.

And what if it works? Let's say it grows the eCS user base by a factor of five.
This would be huge and possible unrealistic, but if it did, then new people are
using, buying, programming, and telling others. Even Mensys can slowly bring the
up afterwords (version 3.0) after "hooking" all these people with new updates
they don't want to be without. Things can start moving, programmers can make
money, eCS can get more software, the circle is renewed.

It's just a thought, since I see this with the WebOS right now. What are your
thoughts? I have also posted this on the Bluenexus (www.bluenexus.net) site.

Craig Miller
www.bluenexus.net