5 ms·

Well it can happen if a significant enough open source project establishes a protocol early enough and doesn't get co-opted. That or a consortium of companies

by kjrose 6y ago

Well it can happen if a significant enough open source project establishes a protocol early enough and doesn't get co-opted. That or a consortium of companies agree on some sort of standard. (See the work on pc buses in the early pc days) But you are right. When companies run under trying to get as many users locked in as possible during a paid for investors period. This model is precisely the opposite outcome expected as the whole point is to build a moat around the sales model.

api 6y ago
For something to get traction, it has to have excellent UI and UX. So far open source hasn't been very successful at providing that since there is no economic model to finance the immense amount of work required for good UX.
- edoceo 6y ago
  GitLab? Xfce?
- nvrspyx 6y ago
  That view seems a little shoehorned because the parent comment specified "protocol", implying that it would be the connection between client and storage, thus not user-facing. Regardless, * Blender * Godot * Krita * GitLab * Olive * Firefox * Thunderbird * NextCloud * Amarok * Vital * and more The problem isn't an "economic model". The problem is that most open-source projects simply don't attract UI designers, UX researchers, and users because contribution flows are more technical or geared toward developers. UX research isn't "expensive" when referring to open-source projects because it predominantly requires people: designers, researchers, and users. The whole foundation of open-source is volunteerism.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    This view is the one that feels shoehorned. "Normies" (not pejorative) have no idea what a protocol is. They just want something that works and is convenient as possible. That's how we ended up at the $free+$surveillance App Store / modern Web model.
    - nvrspyx 6y ago
      Since when was HN a normie site?
      - lupire 6y ago
        HN builds products for "normies".
  - satyrnein 6y ago
    What IS the contribution flow for a designer, anyway? If they can't submit a PR, it seems like the best they can do is submit an issue with a mockup. Are volunteer developers likely to jump on that and implement it? Most developers I've worked with don't exactly love going back and forth with designers on UI stuff.
  - lupire 6y ago
    Volunteerism is much rarer than paid work, and paid work prefers proprietary too get the money to pay. And volunteerism was much more popular in the 1990s when it was easy to write software by hard to sell it. App stores suffocated open source by offering a path to revenue.
- ivan888 6y ago
  I posited a similar point to a former colleague (mine was more about eventual market dominance due to excellent UI+UX), and he came back with Craigslist as a perfect example of a product that gained a massive user base well into an era where its UI felt very outdated. A few years after this exchange, I feel more like I was right about my point: FB Marketplace has almost completely taken over as far as a classified product marketplace, but the point still stands that Craigslist was able to do a ton with very lackluster UI+UX
  - cycomanic 6y ago
    Another counter example: amazon. By far the worst userinterface of any webbshop, no filters, hardly any categories a search were very small changes in spelling/wording make huge changes in results. And still they are by far the biggest game in town.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    I think the problem with this analysis of Craigslist vs. Facebook is twofold. One, Craigslist had, in fact, a great UI. It was simple, clean and accessible to everyone, no matter whether you were using the newest desktop browser, a screen reader, a cheap phone or a potato. Craigslist is a success story of bullshit-free UI. It got beaten by FB Marketplace because Facebook has almost three billion captive users, and a marketplace bundled in the service they use many times a month takes less effort to visit than a completely separate site. From this, and many other cases - like e.g. everyone hating the IM/videoconference system they use and yet using them anyway, I conclude two rules of thumb: - UI that's good for users has very little to do with what UI/UX specialists peddle today; - Network effects trump UIs - a sticky service with bad UI will beat a competitor that offers much better UI, but doesn't hold the user captive.
    - bsder 6y ago
      Craigslist also got beaten because they fought becoming a unified marketplace--with lawyers. Had they not fiercely destroyed all the various "Search all Craiglist" mechanisms, they might have had a chance at fighting FB Marketplace.
- zo1 6y ago
  UX is a trojan horse, now everything has to be mobile friendly for absolutely no bloody reason. You know what also works on mobile? Zooming, yes you heard me. Just the other day I had someone, an old person, complain about how a "revamp" of an internet banking site. They rewrote their functional, working UI, with a site that was designed by "UX designers", and you know how he phrased his opinion of the new site? "They made the site for stupid people".
ivan888 6y ago
One of the better examples still seeing widespread mainstream use is email, and this even applies to multiple stages throughout the email ecosystem: sending mail, receiving mail, managing mailboxes. Imagine if email wasn't cross provider compatible
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  The surviving open protocols are like libraries: they were created before the space got commercialized. They got grandfathered in. If libraries didn't exist for centuries already, there is no way they could have been created under current intellectual property laws and IP economy. Similarly, new open protocols don't generally gain widespread adoption - and in the rare case they do, that's only because some companies are using them to gain adoption; once those companies gain the market share they want, they switch to proprietary protocols and the open one dies. See e.g. Google and XMPP or RSS.
  - texasbigdata 6y ago
    What about, tangentially, cellphone standards or HTML standard that have iterated and are now at version X? Your point stands and a simultaneous coevolution of the standard, the userbase, and the (app/thing) functionality does seem possible.
  - chrisweekly 6y ago
    Great points -- w caveat that RSS isn't dead! :)
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Technically. Neither is XMPP :). It's just increasingly rare to see in the wild.
- mbreese 6y ago
  Email is only useful because it is cross platform compatible. Otherwise, we’d all be back to writing to some friends in AOL, others in MSN, maybe some back in Compuserve. Some people like to send messages only in Facebook and others via Twitter DMs. None of these are/were interoperable which is why they aren’t ubiquitously used. Email is only useful because each server can send and receive with other servers. But we all know this, so what the point here? I would say that my point is that if interoperability becomes more useful than the walled garden approach, then we will see something like this posts call for BYO client. Email is an example. We have interoperable email because it is was more useful than service specific inboxes. Until interoperability is necessary for Word, we won’t see an opening for other Word “clients”. Aside: you could argue that Google built Gmail to make a dent in the ubiquity that was Exchange for corporate messaging. It exploited the openness/interoperability of email in order to do this. If you accept that argument, then maybe they should take a page from that playbook and work to make Google Docs as open as possible. Allow for more interaction with external clients. Let a more open ecosystem develop. That might have the potential to diminish the position of Office for document creation. Or maybe email is just so old, the owners got established before it could be commercialized... it might happen again, but I’m not hopeful. For example, I don’t expect Twitter to care about federating their system with other messaging applications. There is too much to be gained (selling ads) by keeping people on their site.

by kjrose 6y ago

api 6y ago

For something to get traction, it has to have excellent UI and UX. So far open source hasn't been very successful at providing that since there is no economic model to finance the immense amount of work required for good UX.

edoceo 6y ago
GitLab? Xfce?
nvrspyx 6y ago
That view seems a little shoehorned because the parent comment specified "protocol", implying that it would be the connection between client and storage, thus not user-facing. Regardless, * Blender * Godot * Krita * GitLab * Olive * Firefox * Thunderbird * NextCloud * Amarok * Vital * and more The problem isn't an "economic model". The problem is that most open-source projects simply don't attract UI designers, UX researchers, and users because contribution flows are more technical or geared toward developers. UX research isn't "expensive" when referring to open-source projects because it predominantly requires people: designers, researchers, and users. The whole foundation of open-source is volunteerism.
- Lammy 6y ago
  This view is the one that feels shoehorned. "Normies" (not pejorative) have no idea what a protocol is. They just want something that works and is convenient as possible. That's how we ended up at the $free+$surveillance App Store / modern Web model.
  - nvrspyx 6y ago
    Since when was HN a normie site?
    - lupire 6y ago
      HN builds products for "normies".
- satyrnein 6y ago
  What IS the contribution flow for a designer, anyway? If they can't submit a PR, it seems like the best they can do is submit an issue with a mockup. Are volunteer developers likely to jump on that and implement it? Most developers I've worked with don't exactly love going back and forth with designers on UI stuff.
- lupire 6y ago
  Volunteerism is much rarer than paid work, and paid work prefers proprietary too get the money to pay. And volunteerism was much more popular in the 1990s when it was easy to write software by hard to sell it. App stores suffocated open source by offering a path to revenue.
ivan888 6y ago
I posited a similar point to a former colleague (mine was more about eventual market dominance due to excellent UI+UX), and he came back with Craigslist as a perfect example of a product that gained a massive user base well into an era where its UI felt very outdated. A few years after this exchange, I feel more like I was right about my point: FB Marketplace has almost completely taken over as far as a classified product marketplace, but the point still stands that Craigslist was able to do a ton with very lackluster UI+UX
- cycomanic 6y ago
  Another counter example: amazon. By far the worst userinterface of any webbshop, no filters, hardly any categories a search were very small changes in spelling/wording make huge changes in results. And still they are by far the biggest game in town.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  I think the problem with this analysis of Craigslist vs. Facebook is twofold. One, Craigslist had, in fact, a great UI. It was simple, clean and accessible to everyone, no matter whether you were using the newest desktop browser, a screen reader, a cheap phone or a potato. Craigslist is a success story of bullshit-free UI. It got beaten by FB Marketplace because Facebook has almost three billion captive users, and a marketplace bundled in the service they use many times a month takes less effort to visit than a completely separate site. From this, and many other cases - like e.g. everyone hating the IM/videoconference system they use and yet using them anyway, I conclude two rules of thumb: - UI that's good for users has very little to do with what UI/UX specialists peddle today; - Network effects trump UIs - a sticky service with bad UI will beat a competitor that offers much better UI, but doesn't hold the user captive.
  - bsder 6y ago
    Craigslist also got beaten because they fought becoming a unified marketplace--with lawyers. Had they not fiercely destroyed all the various "Search all Craiglist" mechanisms, they might have had a chance at fighting FB Marketplace.
zo1 6y ago
UX is a trojan horse, now everything has to be mobile friendly for absolutely no bloody reason. You know what also works on mobile? Zooming, yes you heard me. Just the other day I had someone, an old person, complain about how a "revamp" of an internet banking site. They rewrote their functional, working UI, with a site that was designed by "UX designers", and you know how he phrased his opinion of the new site? "They made the site for stupid people".

ivan888 6y ago

One of the better examples still seeing widespread mainstream use is email, and this even applies to multiple stages throughout the email ecosystem: sending mail, receiving mail, managing mailboxes. Imagine if email wasn't cross provider compatible

TeMPOraL 6y ago
The surviving open protocols are like libraries: they were created before the space got commercialized. They got grandfathered in. If libraries didn't exist for centuries already, there is no way they could have been created under current intellectual property laws and IP economy. Similarly, new open protocols don't generally gain widespread adoption - and in the rare case they do, that's only because some companies are using them to gain adoption; once those companies gain the market share they want, they switch to proprietary protocols and the open one dies. See e.g. Google and XMPP or RSS.
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  What about, tangentially, cellphone standards or HTML standard that have iterated and are now at version X? Your point stands and a simultaneous coevolution of the standard, the userbase, and the (app/thing) functionality does seem possible.
- chrisweekly 6y ago
  Great points -- w caveat that RSS isn't dead! :)
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Technically. Neither is XMPP :). It's just increasingly rare to see in the wild.
mbreese 6y ago
Email is only useful because it is cross platform compatible. Otherwise, we’d all be back to writing to some friends in AOL, others in MSN, maybe some back in Compuserve. Some people like to send messages only in Facebook and others via Twitter DMs. None of these are/were interoperable which is why they aren’t ubiquitously used. Email is only useful because each server can send and receive with other servers. But we all know this, so what the point here? I would say that my point is that if interoperability becomes more useful than the walled garden approach, then we will see something like this posts call for BYO client. Email is an example. We have interoperable email because it is was more useful than service specific inboxes. Until interoperability is necessary for Word, we won’t see an opening for other Word “clients”. Aside: you could argue that Google built Gmail to make a dent in the ubiquity that was Exchange for corporate messaging. It exploited the openness/interoperability of email in order to do this. If you accept that argument, then maybe they should take a page from that playbook and work to make Google Docs as open as possible. Allow for more interaction with external clients. Let a more open ecosystem develop. That might have the potential to diminish the position of Office for document creation. Or maybe email is just so old, the owners got established before it could be commercialized... it might happen again, but I’m not hopeful. For example, I don’t expect Twitter to care about federating their system with other messaging applications. There is too much to be gained (selling ads) by keeping people on their site.