App Stores are monopolistic on the platform they serve. If I want to build Mac Apps, I have to go through the App Store. Yes, I could make it a web app, but that would limit the types of apps I can create.
What would make more money: Paul Graham lunches everyday for a month at a lower price or limiting supply to 1 Paul Graham lunch at the coming auction price?
Similar to what Swivel was trying to do. Great idea, nice execution, but really how will you monetize this? There is no real market for consumer grade "intuitive" statistical software. While this will appeal to casual data analyzers, these users arnt ready to spend much money on tools. And those doing data analysis for a living prefer their power tools: R, SAS, Matlab, NumPy, etc.
Agreed that if you spend most of your day most days doing analysis of large datasets you probably need a power tool.
But there's a whole class of overlooked folks who need to do statistical analysis on smaller datasets on more of a weekly or several-consecutive-intense-days-per-month basis. These folks, who split time between Excel and stats tools, make up a surprisingly high proportion of the user base of stats products. And they tell us they're willing to pay for something that makes their analysis and communication more efficient.
Thanks for the comments, and for the kind words RE the idea and execution.
edit: And to be fair to your point, we're sort of comparing apples and oranges insomuch as you're looking at what we have now (not nearly enough) and we're looking at our roadmap for what we'll have in six months, a year, etc.
