3 ms·

Nobody wants to pay for anything, so the services that figured out how to profit from people not paying will win. There was this idea born in the late '90's/ea

Nobody wants to pay for anything, so the services that figured out how to profit from people not paying will win. There was this idea born in the late '90's/early 00's that everything digital should be free. The internet was dominated by teenagers with no job and no credit card, so it made sense. But the result of that has been a whole generation with an allergy to compensation, and the inability for anyone to compete with "free" services, even if everyone hates that service.

virgil_disgr4ce 5mo ago
> Nobody wants to pay for anything Congratulations, this might be the single most trivially-disprovable statement I've ever seen on this site
- joleyj 5mo ago
  [dead]
- hombre_fatal 5mo ago
  Try to respond with substance here on HN. Their point can’t be summarized by what you quoted, yet you responded to a quote.
mancerayder 5mo ago
That's a really curious perspective. There are a few different angles of attack here, but let's start with this: it WAS free because people were making free content. Before the Internet we were hosting free BBSes (look those up), we then hosted websites which we made ourselves when the Internet was commercialized, and we paid for services like games where it made sense. You'd buy software you'd own forever (like Photoshop), you'd buy music you owned (like CDs), and there weren't 30 subscriptions randomly renewing on your credit card. Google won because it was a single text box. Yahoo lost because it full of ads and pretended to be a phone book. Linux won in the server world because it was free and superior, Windows lost because it's shite and expensive. I could go on, but before I do that I'd have to be convinced I'm not replying to a 27 year-old who just graduated business school.
- rglullis 5mo ago
  BBS were only amateur efforts. Linux would not go anywhere if it was not for IBM famously investing 1 billion in 2000. You can get some development and innovations built purely on "free", but without actual professionals who can make a living by developing these systems, they never take off to reach the masses. The best example is social media and the Fediverse.
  - admash 5mo ago
    That’s disingenous. Microsoft themselves considered Linux a serious threat as early as 1998, as described in their own confidential memoranda. (AKA the Halloween Documents released by ESR.)
    - rglullis 5mo ago
      You are right, I abused the hyperbole. The IBM investment was not the first thing that propelled Linux to the mainstream. I remember that in 1999 my university was already installing Red Hat with Gnome 1.0 on the workstations for the computer lab, which of course already implies that Red Hat already existed as a mature company trying to make money from support contracts. But even if the data point is not good to support the argument, I don't think one could argue that Linux succeeded by "being free". If Linux was a "serious threat" in 1998, it was because there already companies looking into it and willing to make back it up financially to help its development.
  - saltcured 5mo ago
    I adopted Linux in college in 1993 and, like many peers, brought it to my R&D job and observed this wave of expansion through the mid to late 90s. Linux was already "going somewhere" in 2000 for IBM to even notice it. Lots of federal grant money was directly or indirectly improving Linux due to FOSS folks like me. It was getting so much commercial and academic engagement that we had the idioms (cliches?) of the "LAMP stack" for basic web servers and "Beowulf clusters" for high performance computing. Even SGI was already revealing a Linux plan, before 2000, when they still seemed like a fixture of the HPC industry rather than an also ran.
psychoslave 5mo ago
Most people will gladly throw large pile of money for everything that they feel convinced serve them well, provided they are not living by some ridiculously low wage that turn them into monthly paycheck serfs. When large portion of moneyless teenagers grown up into indebted to death adults, there is no wonder they stick to lure at free services rather than unaffordable services.
Zambyte 5mo ago
Counter point: https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats About 70k people are paying at least $5 a month. I've been using the $25 a month plan for nearly 3 years now. I imagine Kagi is doing alright.
- anon7000 5mo ago
  Google could loose 70k active users and it wouldn’t even register as a blip. They have like 50,000-60,000 TIMES as many active users. I’m one of those 70k people and support Kagi, and I also strongly believe in companies succeeding and sustaining themselves on a small scale like this. I think our economy would be healthier if it was made of many, many small companies, not a few massive ones. But we can’t argue Kagi is anything more than a super niche product, for now. :(
  - saltyoldman 5mo ago
    Typically the reason for there being so few smaller companies is paradoxically that small companies exist to be gobbled up by the big ones.
  - Zambyte 5mo ago
    A company can be successful without dominating the world.
kevin_thibedeau 5mo ago
Prior to eternal September, the internet was dominated by college students and staff. Everything was free by virtue of there being no secure payment mechanism. That spirit continued as it opened to the broader public.
- rglullis 5mo ago
  > Everything was free by virtue of there being no secure payment mechanism. That and the fact Universities provided free, fast and unmetered internet access. I doubt they would be running anything if they had to pay $1/hour like regular people had to in their dial-up days.

virgil_disgr4ce 5mo ago

> Nobody wants to pay for anything Congratulations, this might be the single most trivially-disprovable statement I've ever seen on this site

joleyj 5mo ago
[dead]
hombre_fatal 5mo ago
Try to respond with substance here on HN. Their point can’t be summarized by what you quoted, yet you responded to a quote.

mancerayder 5mo ago

That's a really curious perspective. There are a few different angles of attack here, but let's start with this: it WAS free because people were making free content. Before the Internet we were hosting free BBSes (look those up), we then hosted websites which we made ourselves when the Internet was commercialized, and we paid for services like games where it made sense. You'd buy software you'd own forever (like Photoshop), you'd buy music you owned (like CDs), and there weren't 30 subscriptions randomly renewing on your credit card. Google won because it was a single text box. Yahoo lost because it full of ads and pretended to be a phone book. Linux won in the server world because it was free and superior, Windows lost because it's shite and expensive. I could go on, but before I do that I'd have to be convinced I'm not replying to a 27 year-old who just graduated business school.

rglullis 5mo ago
BBS were only amateur efforts. Linux would not go anywhere if it was not for IBM famously investing 1 billion in 2000. You can get some development and innovations built purely on "free", but without actual professionals who can make a living by developing these systems, they never take off to reach the masses. The best example is social media and the Fediverse.
- admash 5mo ago
  That’s disingenous. Microsoft themselves considered Linux a serious threat as early as 1998, as described in their own confidential memoranda. (AKA the Halloween Documents released by ESR.)
  - rglullis 5mo ago
    You are right, I abused the hyperbole. The IBM investment was not the first thing that propelled Linux to the mainstream. I remember that in 1999 my university was already installing Red Hat with Gnome 1.0 on the workstations for the computer lab, which of course already implies that Red Hat already existed as a mature company trying to make money from support contracts. But even if the data point is not good to support the argument, I don't think one could argue that Linux succeeded by "being free". If Linux was a "serious threat" in 1998, it was because there already companies looking into it and willing to make back it up financially to help its development.
- saltcured 5mo ago
  I adopted Linux in college in 1993 and, like many peers, brought it to my R&D job and observed this wave of expansion through the mid to late 90s. Linux was already "going somewhere" in 2000 for IBM to even notice it. Lots of federal grant money was directly or indirectly improving Linux due to FOSS folks like me. It was getting so much commercial and academic engagement that we had the idioms (cliches?) of the "LAMP stack" for basic web servers and "Beowulf clusters" for high performance computing. Even SGI was already revealing a Linux plan, before 2000, when they still seemed like a fixture of the HPC industry rather than an also ran.

psychoslave 5mo ago

Most people will gladly throw large pile of money for everything that they feel convinced serve them well, provided they are not living by some ridiculously low wage that turn them into monthly paycheck serfs. When large portion of moneyless teenagers grown up into indebted to death adults, there is no wonder they stick to lure at free services rather than unaffordable services.

Zambyte 5mo ago

Counter point: https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats About 70k people are paying at least $5 a month. I've been using the $25 a month plan for nearly 3 years now. I imagine Kagi is doing alright.

anon7000 5mo ago
Google could loose 70k active users and it wouldn’t even register as a blip. They have like 50,000-60,000 TIMES as many active users. I’m one of those 70k people and support Kagi, and I also strongly believe in companies succeeding and sustaining themselves on a small scale like this. I think our economy would be healthier if it was made of many, many small companies, not a few massive ones. But we can’t argue Kagi is anything more than a super niche product, for now. :(
- saltyoldman 5mo ago
  Typically the reason for there being so few smaller companies is paradoxically that small companies exist to be gobbled up by the big ones.
- Zambyte 5mo ago
  A company can be successful without dominating the world.

kevin_thibedeau 5mo ago

Prior to eternal September, the internet was dominated by college students and staff. Everything was free by virtue of there being no secure payment mechanism. That spirit continued as it opened to the broader public.

rglullis 5mo ago
> Everything was free by virtue of there being no secure payment mechanism. That and the fact Universities provided free, fast and unmetered internet access. I doubt they would be running anything if they had to pay $1/hour like regular people had to in their dial-up days.