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Thanks for the feedback. What data would help with the argument?

• yodon 7y ago
  > We won’t buy from people or companies we don’t trust. The same is true in software. That reads like a sensible statement, but I'm not sure it's true or if it's true I'm not sure how the scale factors fit in. Just raising the obvious counter-example, Facebook is pretty wildly distrusted, and yet is widely used by people who distrust it. Did they "purchase" FB? Not literally, but they certainly engage with it in ways similar to purchasing and pay for it with ad viewing. As to the data question, I'd think the best approach would involve looking for explicit measures of trust (eg surveys) and seeing how those map to revenue growth or subscriber growth for software companies. The brand strength you called out may be relevant as a proxy for trust, but I think that's assuming the thesis to be true and then proving it to be true by saying strong brands have strong sales numbers therefore trust is the key to sales (without ever proving trust is key to software brand strength). Another approach might be to look at sales numbers following data leak incidents, but I think that's more complex because these days those announcements are so prevalent they may not stay in the news cycle long enough to matter (which arguably is itself a sign trust is not as key a differentiator as one would expect). As one more thought, I'd expect b2b software purchase decisions to have a steeper dependence on trust than b2c, but that's just a guess. Your thesis is certainly an important one to explore, and I think all of us hope it's true because an economic incentive like this is a powerful force encouraging companies to treat our data in a trustworthy manner.