Comment by 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.
People don’t buy Slack. Corporations do. They also buy Teams…
> People don’t buy Slack. Corporations do.
One, corporate cash is just as good as people cash. Two, people absolutely paid for WhatsApp before it was acquired. And three, I am a people and I personally pay for Microsoft 365 and on occasion have used Teams.
B2B sales by definition is where the buyer is not the user. The software doesn’t have to be anything the end user wants or have a good user experience. In corporate sells, it often just has to be in the right upper quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Square.
They definitely weren’t bought by corporations because they care about open standards or great UX.
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> people absolutely paid for WhatsApp before it was acquired
Wasn't that a one-time payment of 1$?
No, I wouldn't pay for WhatsApp.
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People buy discord nitro, though
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.