Michael Hanscom left a comment about the iLife Up to Date program as a subscription play.
As I wrote that, I had the Mac OS X Up-to-Date program in the back of my mind, but I saw something in my browsing that mentioned a subscription model for iLife, and it made sense. And it could be a good thing . . .
It would be interesting to see what Apple comes up with if they have an obligation to innovate these products (and integration gives them some options that one-off products wouldn’t provide). As it is, some of these are in their 3rd and 4th iterations, while others are new out of the box.
The reward for Apple would be to have iLife more widely recognized as part of their strategy for empowering users: you can read that in the tagline “It’s like Microsoft Office for the rest of your life” with it’s echoes of “the rest of us.” We know about the individual apps, iTunes, most of all, but does the guy shopping for a home computer realize what a difference this makes to his “out of the box experience?”
Apple faces some risks. What if they can’t deliver sufficiently meaningful innovations to keep us writing those checks? And of course, unlike business buyers, there’s no business case, no ROI equation, we can make to justify buying another year of iLife: it has to be compelling.
That’s not to say I don’t think it can be done . . .
[Posted with ecto]