Comment by api

3 months ago

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.

15 comments

api

Reply
queenkjuul  3 months ago

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!

newyorkahh  3 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross  3 months ago

> 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.

  • api  3 months ago

    Slack is an example of a user-centric open protocol?

    Slack proves my point. It's closed and vertically integrated and people pay for it. Nobody paid for the open precursors to Slack so they stagnated.