Wolfram Alpha lowers iPhone app price, will give refunds

I dutifully jumped through the numerous and exacting hoops Wolfram set up to allegedly get this refund, including sending in multiple screen shots from *both* iTunes and my iPhone, which is annoying to say the least.

Today (18 days later), I get an email from Mr Redden at Wolfram saying one of my meticulously prepared screen shots doesn't reveal the information they need to process the refund.

Filing my taxes was easier than this!

Of course, I should've noticed the date of this announcement: 1st April. Fool me once, etc.

Uh guys? Look at the date.

Was it $1.99 initially? Remarkable to me that they couldn't find a pricing strategy that fell anywhere between the premium $50 and bargain-basement $1.99. Sounds to me like they've completely overreacted - twice. That could be contributing to a consumer inability to figure out how much the app might actually be worth.

The pricing issue for Wolfram was more a marketing/expectations issue than anything else.

Imagine if they'd released it very differently. Initially released with native front-ends on desktops, targeted at researchers/journalists/whatever, as a product. They made it public and free for a week or two for buzz and press, and then started selling it.

Then, they released mobile clients.

They could have easily sold the client for a $50 one-time fee.

Alternately, they could have made it a subscription service, for $50/year, accessible from the free phone/desktop clients.

Marketing and expectations are everything in this sort of thing.

Try this:

life, the universe and everything

and you get the correct answer :-)

Refunds? You mean at least one person actually paid $50 for this? If that's the case, I say no refunds. Call it a stupid tax.

Already $1.99 go get it....Wednesday night

Yeah, what directeco said.

Really, this app is not much more than a wrapper around the FREE web site.

And the insane charges they want for other developers to do the exact same thing [$$$ per search] mean nobody else can create a better wrapper without also charging per-search. And nobody is going to pay you per search when they could just go straight to the web site and do the same thing themselves for free.

It says something about the app store when this app can't sell for $50? Give me a break! A desktop version of this app with 10 times the functionality wouldn't sell for $50. Says something about the app store? More like says something about the completely unrealistic expectations of the developer...