Comment by mpweiher
6 years ago
> But nobody is going to. Because it makes no business sense to do so.
While your reasons make sense, they make sense from the supplier side. However, the ultimate decider of what makes "business sense" is not the supplier, it's the customer.
You can have all the supply-side advantages in the world, if your customers decide they want that other gal's product, you're toast.
It may not even make sense from a supplier side (sometimes). Instead of just writing the SW, the supplier now has to manage servers, deal with angry customers when downtime happens, backup, protect the servers from attackers, deal with scaling, deal with customers who don't like change, etc., etc.
With local SW, you can just write it and mostly forget about it, as long as OS stays compatible with your program.
But the customer is easily distracted. That's why we have things like Facebook where customers will happily give up their privacy in return for a little functionality.
Please sir, can I have some more?
As long as the internet remains free and not completely controlled by a few big players.