Why Rosetta Stone is Missing the Spirit of App Culture
I’ve always been pretty “meh” about Rosetta Stone, mostly because it’s so expensive but also because its method of making you guess at pictures for hours seems a lot more brainless than other experiences I’ve had learning foreign languages. But when I saw today that they’ve released an iPad app, I got a bit excited. Finally, a chance to use Rosetta Stone on a touch-screen platform, at a much cheaper rate. Or so I thought.
Turns out that to use the Rosetta Stone app, you have to have their software, which starts at $179, and that’s just for one level. Compared to all the free ways you can learn languages in this day and age – LiveMocha, Voxy, etc. – spending $200 to learn a fairly piddly level of French seems old-fashioned.
The great thing about the Apple App Store and app culture in general is that it has challenged companies to offer simpler, cheaper versions of their software to turn more people on to what they do. That’s why Apple released Pages and Keynote apps for a meager $10.
A company that understood this idea was Adobe. Sure CS5 will still cost about as much as a used car, but their iPad apps are all under $10. Instead of translating their entire services to the iPad, they figured out how to distill certain functions and features to give an Adobe experience without charging Adobe dollars.
I was hoping that Rosetta Stone would do something similar, and release apps geared around certain functions, like an app for mastering the Arabic alphabet, or one for learning Chinese radicals, all at $10 a pop. Those I would have bought.