End of Freemium?. A conversation about a Infinut decision at Linkedin

All this is related to a hard discussion in the linkedin:

https://www.linkedin.com/nhome/updates?topic=activity%3A5986641279243542528&activity=activity%3A5986641279243542528

Related to the Infinut announcement:

http://infinut.com/2015/03/25/the-end-of-freemium/

The End of Freemium?

I am still reading all this and these ideas are resonating in my head:

Talking out about the fact of having eliminated all free versions of a collection of children's apps some people of google plus says:

Deepak Kumar:

“Good products tend to sell well :-) Wish you the best! “

Trevor Sullivan:

“ I agree with Deepak. If you have a good product, your customers will be happy to pay for it. As a consumer (we all are), I can personally vouch for this. ;) ”

Greg Bulmash:

“It is AFTER the professor has been paid and AFTER the students who paid tuition get the benefit of the class that it is shared more widely.”

and:

“Content sharing licenses and freemium apps are the CHOICE of creators”.

And later:

“My volunteer group is hosted by Amazon and we have volunteers from Microsoft, Amazon, Ticketmaster, Boeing, Expedia and others who all donate their time to teach and mentor. Microsoft also donates $17 for every hour an employee volunteers with our group “

And yesterday the ultimate:

“If you can make such outrageous, insulting, and blatantly prejudiced statements, then you need to do some introspection and deal with the poison inside your own soul, because that kind of bigotry and belligerence has no place in civilized discourse”.

And Finally: Deepak Kumar:

“If there was an ignore button I'd be reaching for it now”.

(as a reaction for my: “To me cause I hilarity people who do good deeds during the weekend to make up for what they do during the week, and also these people who dare to give lessons and advices to everyone. Sorry”.

If we look at this discussion imagining we do not know what it is, we seem to be talking about the sale of any product of dispensable luxury. Or something worse.

I think some kind of brainwashing in the field of marketing is seriously affecting these people, or maybe they do not know about what kind of topic we are talking

We are talking about the disappearance of freemium versions of some quality programs made by Ana Redmond from Infinut dedicated to pedagogy and didactics of mathematics. And I talk about the inappropriate applause that this decision has had on the GooglePlus audience.

First I must say that I share the concern of the developers of apps for the lack of profitability of apps in general that will never reward the efforts of programmers. (Modestly I think I'm a programmer too).

And I am also concerned that because of this lack of profitability of apps, good programmers are forced to work in big companies, and having to endure which is hard to bear in the workplace sometimes. Including my seemingly unfair criticism.

In this discussion, I think no one has taken into account is that we are talking about useful programs when teaching mathematics to young children.

Basic and useful teaching resources to teach math to young children, should be free, must not contain advertisements or hidden payment methods of any kind. This applies to apps and web pages, and to everything that is available to the kids.

Making teaching materials to teach maths to children, is a kind of service to humanity. This work is itself one of these good works that some do only some weekends

And no one freelance programmer is forced to make programs that constitute teaching resources. There are many other fields and disciplines in which they can develop free apps, paid apps, apps with ads or apps with payment mechanisms within applications without any problem.

If you do not already know, I think this is the right time for you to know.

And finally, heading directly to Ana Redmond, I would say that surely the "freemium" versions of their programs were not sufficiently accepted by parents of children because they offered on the one hand free games, and otherwise inaccessible games. This is very common and widely used in general in the world of apps, I think this structure has caused a misunderstanding. Parents have logically thought that was a free version to generate a kind of abstinence syndrome of the paid version. To avoid this misunderstanding, it would be necessary in future free versions of these programs don't will announce inaccessible parts or paid parts. Free applications should do what they already announced, and developers must consider that everyone is smart enough to see that, from the same company, there is another and more complete paid version.

Ethically, independent programmers should be a bit better than drug dealers 

located on the doors of schools.