4 ms·

My personal take is that, as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society, there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successfu

My personal take is that, as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society, there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards. This is made evident by countless technology firms and other industries.

rubyfan 7y ago
The internet’s previous models were doomed to fail. Service providers did not have a reliable monetization scheme. Client apps for open protocols have rarely had wide adoption and longevity, especially anything you had to pay for. I can think of plenty of examples of paid client apps from the late 90s/early 2000s... email clients, web, irc, etc. that just aren’t around because not enough people would pay for the client to sustain their development. Slack and other tools are solving a problem customers have and they should be compensated for it, especially given much of their users are profit oriented enterprises.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  > Slack and other tools are solving a problem customers have ...while creating others: fragmentation and lock-in
- bborud 7y ago
  And yet, the Internet exists because short sighted profit requirements were kept at bay, and eventually the Internet managed to create more value for society than any online service ever by a margin so large that logarithm of the difference is amazingly large. I work for a telco. My assumption is that the profit margin for connectivity will first converge on zero and then it will drop below zero. There's so much value in the services above connectivity that connectivity won't need to be profitable. Of course, nobody in my industry will want to talk about that, or even admit this is a real possibility, because it implies that connectivity will most likely be owned by those who make money on services on top. If we think net neutrality is important today, we ain't seen nothing yet. And given how hard we have had to fight in the past to just about maintain some form of parity, I'm not extremely optimistic about the future.
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
> as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society Found the bug. > there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols. While the world economy is quickly moving into endless vertical monopolies, history has shown that governments can sometimes wake up and restore competition. Perhaps in 50 years using open standards will be encouraged e.g. by providing a tax discount
- briandear 7y ago
  > It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols. I don’t care. I just want my tool to solve my problem so I can focus on creating business value at my job. I am sure we could all make our own hammers, but time spent making hammers is time lost from using them.
  - bborud 7y ago
    This isn't really what we're talking about. A better analogy are laptops, phones and tractors - which you are not allowed to repair and only work within a closed ecosystem that you either have to opt into our out of, and where opting out has an extraordinary cost. I use a Mac. I'm part of the problem for having handed my money to an abusive, fraudulent company that is now squeezing all its users for more money for increasingly lower quality products. It used to be easy to buy into Apple's walled garden. But now choice of convenience over freedom is starting to cost me real money and that money buys less each year.
    - codyb 7y ago
      I’m interested in the lower quality part. My Dad _just_ upgraded from an iPhone 5. Do you think his Xs won’t last as long? I agree the laptop situation is a bit shitty. I hate the USB-C everything on my work laptop. Everything works fine on my personal computer but as soon as I plug my usb hub into a usb c adaptor everything stutters. Love their privacy stance though. Best in the business for sure. Also, what’s abusive? And what’s fraudulent? Apparently their new monitors are very well priced. And building the same machine you’d get in a MacBookPro or different model ends up being more expensive or similarly priced. I could be wrong, and I am, certainly, an Apple fan, but I will criticize when I think it’s appropriate and don’t hold views concretely.

rubyfan 7y ago

The internet’s previous models were doomed to fail. Service providers did not have a reliable monetization scheme. Client apps for open protocols have rarely had wide adoption and longevity, especially anything you had to pay for. I can think of plenty of examples of paid client apps from the late 90s/early 2000s... email clients, web, irc, etc. that just aren’t around because not enough people would pay for the client to sustain their development. Slack and other tools are solving a problem customers have and they should be compensated for it, especially given much of their users are profit oriented enterprises.

eeZah7Ux 7y ago
> Slack and other tools are solving a problem customers have ...while creating others: fragmentation and lock-in
bborud 7y ago
And yet, the Internet exists because short sighted profit requirements were kept at bay, and eventually the Internet managed to create more value for society than any online service ever by a margin so large that logarithm of the difference is amazingly large. I work for a telco. My assumption is that the profit margin for connectivity will first converge on zero and then it will drop below zero. There's so much value in the services above connectivity that connectivity won't need to be profitable. Of course, nobody in my industry will want to talk about that, or even admit this is a real possibility, because it implies that connectivity will most likely be owned by those who make money on services on top. If we think net neutrality is important today, we ain't seen nothing yet. And given how hard we have had to fight in the past to just about maintain some form of parity, I'm not extremely optimistic about the future.

eeZah7Ux 7y ago

> as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society Found the bug. > there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols. While the world economy is quickly moving into endless vertical monopolies, history has shown that governments can sometimes wake up and restore competition. Perhaps in 50 years using open standards will be encouraged e.g. by providing a tax discount

briandear 7y ago
> It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols. I don’t care. I just want my tool to solve my problem so I can focus on creating business value at my job. I am sure we could all make our own hammers, but time spent making hammers is time lost from using them.
- bborud 7y ago
  This isn't really what we're talking about. A better analogy are laptops, phones and tractors - which you are not allowed to repair and only work within a closed ecosystem that you either have to opt into our out of, and where opting out has an extraordinary cost. I use a Mac. I'm part of the problem for having handed my money to an abusive, fraudulent company that is now squeezing all its users for more money for increasingly lower quality products. It used to be easy to buy into Apple's walled garden. But now choice of convenience over freedom is starting to cost me real money and that money buys less each year.
  - codyb 7y ago
    I’m interested in the lower quality part. My Dad _just_ upgraded from an iPhone 5. Do you think his Xs won’t last as long? I agree the laptop situation is a bit shitty. I hate the USB-C everything on my work laptop. Everything works fine on my personal computer but as soon as I plug my usb hub into a usb c adaptor everything stutters. Love their privacy stance though. Best in the business for sure. Also, what’s abusive? And what’s fraudulent? Apparently their new monitors are very well priced. And building the same machine you’d get in a MacBookPro or different model ends up being more expensive or similarly priced. I could be wrong, and I am, certainly, an Apple fan, but I will criticize when I think it’s appropriate and don’t hold views concretely.