37Signals and Pricing Models

A great blog post about why 37Signals’ advice is irrelevant and unhelpful to the majority of web application developers:

‘People are willing to pay’ say 37 signals to the cowering mass of young developers bombarded with an implicit open source manifesto written across the social web. But the success of 37 signals and their relatively high pricing model does not prove people are willing to pay. It proves that people are willing to forego money now for money later, that they are willing to incur temporary costs with expectations of future added value, and that they are not risk averse. All this is interesting and irrelevant. The majority of start-ups are social web oriented. They operate in a consumption-services market.

Synopsis: people will pay for professional and personal development tools, but rarely or not-at-all for online entertainment or social media.