Comment by api
3 months ago
Nobody pays for anything with user centric standards. If software were free to produce and services were free to run this would work, but it doesn’t. Software in particular is incredibly time consuming and expensive, especially if you want to make it usable.
> Nobody pays for anything with user centric standards.
??? Why do you think this?
Do people buy chat apps? Web browsers? Web servers? Web content? Clients or servers for other open standards?
No, which means you’ll never see them get the level of polish or investment that closed stuff gets. Because when it’s closed you can make people pay or monetize it with advertising.
I’m not cheering for this. Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m pointing out why things are this way.
A major problem is that while free software efforts can build working software, it often takes orders of magnitude more work to make software mere mortals can use. That kind of UI/UX polish is also the work programmers hate doing, so you have to pay them to do it. Therefore closed stuff always wins on UI/UX. That means it always takes the network effect. UX polish is the moat that free has never been able to cross.
If the "spy on users and sell the data" business model were illegal, you bet your ass people would pay for chat. People were paying per message to send SMS once upon a time!
You’re right, but browsers are free because their cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the profits a monopolized browser status quo provides, for Windows/Office in 90s snd search/ads with Google. MS started it with free IE and Google improved upon their strategy.
> Do people buy chat apps? Web browsers? Web servers? Web content?
Yes. (Slack. Orion. Since when were servers free?)
The web basically fractures into people who watch ads and complain about paywalls and those who don’t.
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People definitely do pay for it when it's available, even more at the core of this issue is that people would prefer alternatives that are open, where their data can be easily ported to some competitor service if it's better which directly affects the bottomline from companies that push against open standards.
I think you got it clearly reversed in your mind...
They prefer it but they don’t pay for it.
They also don't pay for the non-standards stuff, what's your point? Chrome, Facebook, Instagram. For the paid services like Apple's there's no even an alternative following open standards.
They don't pay because there are no options of services provided by these companies following open standards, exactly because companies wouldn't be able to lock users in their solutions if open standards were commonly deployed and used...
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