>Shame on you guys. When you're on your death bed, none of this will matter. Do good things and build great stuff. Atleast I will reflect back that I made the users, you know the ones that provided me with a living wage, happy.
Users are welcome to pay the real price of the product if they don't want it to be spyware.
At any rate, if you're thinking about work on your deathbed you have more things to worry about than how happy users are with the junk you made while living.
> Users are welcome to pay the real price of the product if they don't want it to be spyware.
Once upon a time there were many profitable business models for selling software.
Then software got big. You weren't selling a thousand copies anymore, now it's a billion.
The economics of software is that the price you "need" to charge goes down when the number of users goes up. If it costs ten million to develop and you have a thousand users, they each have to pay at least $10,000. If you have a million users they only have to pay $10.
If you have a billion users they each only have to pay $0.01.
You can get more than the $0.01 from each user through advertising. What you can't do is get an amount on that scale through payment processing, because the transaction overhead is larger than that.
So now you have a user that the advertiser is willing to pay $0.03 to advertise to. The users themselves are willing to pay $0.05 to not be spied on, but you haven't got any efficient way to get $0.05 from them. It'd have to be much more than that to justify the payment processing overhead, and the user isn't willing to pay that much.
So it's not a matter of the users being unwilling to pay, it's that we don't have an efficient way for them to pay that small of an amount.
Maybe if it wasn't locked to a small area, and had people willing to back it long term, it wouldn't fail?
A common Google problem is that for all that they are a global company, they can't launch shit globally. I was really interested in using Google Contributor, both sides, but limited launch meant that I could only look from far away and never ever encounter a site using it. Hell, I think some of the engineers who worked on it weren't in the very small group allowed to use it.
The real price of software includes the price of delivery.
Users would rather not pay that, so we are stuck with craptastic spyware that is selling their data to google, facebook, the NSA, the Chinese communist party and that organ harvester from Moldova.
> The real price of software includes the price of delivery.
The real price of delivery of software over the Internet is zero.
(Well, it's slightly above zero, because all the networking equipment uses electricity, but you pay for your part of that in your power and Internet bills.)
AWS, which charges ridiculously high prices for bulk bandwidth, charges ~$0.15/GB, and half that if you have high volumes. If your software is 50MB, that's less than a penny. Meanwhile, if even this is too much for you, BitTorrent exists.
Point is: it’s important to keep the grand picture in mind and once in a while step back and think - “Shit...what am I doing?” even though you can’t do much about it due to family, responsibilities and other hard realities of life. When building a company, I don’t want to just build something that deceives people, deploy shady tactics and dark patterns. I want to run an honest business that I can reflect back in life and say “yep, it was a struggle but I did the right things.”
Users are welcome to pay the real price of the product if they don't want it to be spyware.
At any rate, if you're thinking about work on your deathbed you have more things to worry about than how happy users are with the junk you made while living.