Do people buy chat apps? Web browsers? Web servers? Web content? Clients or servers for other open standards?

No, which means you’ll never see them get the level of polish or investment that closed stuff gets. Because when it’s closed you can make people pay or monetize it with advertising.

I’m not cheering for this. Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m pointing out why things are this way.

A major problem is that while free software efforts can build working software, it often takes orders of magnitude more work to make software mere mortals can use. That kind of UI/UX polish is also the work programmers hate doing, so you have to pay them to do it. Therefore closed stuff always wins on UI/UX. That means it always takes the network effect. UX polish is the moat that free has never been able to cross.

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newyorkahh 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

You’re right, but browsers are free because their cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the profits a monopolized browser status quo provides, for Windows/Office in 90s snd search/ads with Google. MS started it with free IE and Google improved upon their strategy.

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queenkjuul a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If the "spy on users and sell the data" business model were illegal, you bet your ass people would pay for chat. People were paying per message to send SMS once upon a time!

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JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Do people buy chat apps? Web browsers? Web servers? Web content?

Yes. (Slack. Orion. Since when were servers free?)

The web basically fractures into people who watch ads and complain about paywalls and those who don’t.

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scarface_74 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

People don’t buy Slack. Corporations do. They also buy Teams…

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JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> People don’t buy Slack. Corporations do.

One, corporate cash is just as good as people cash. Two, people absolutely paid for WhatsApp before it was acquired. And three, I am a people and I personally pay for Microsoft 365 and on occasion have used Teams.

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moritzwarhier 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> people absolutely paid for WhatsApp before it was acquired

Wasn't that a one-time payment of 1$?

No, I wouldn't pay for WhatsApp.

	▲	JumpCrisscross 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Wasn't that a one-time payment of 1$? I think it was $1/year. > I wouldn't pay for WhatsApp Plenty wouldn’t have. There are ad and data-supported models for them.

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scarface_74 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

B2B sales by definition is where the buyer is not the user. The software doesn’t have to be anything the end user wants or have a good user experience. In corporate sells, it often just has to be in the right upper quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Square.

They definitely weren’t bought by corporations because they care about open standards or great UX.

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JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent [-]

> weren’t bought by corporations because they care about open standards or great UX

OP said open products lose because they lack “UI/UX polish.”

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JustExAWS 2 days ago | parent [-]

And how many B2B apps have you used that have “polish”? Slack is okay. But at the end of the day, it’s another crappy Electron app.

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JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent [-]

> how many B2B apps have you used that have “polish”? Slack is okay. But at the end of the day, it’s another crappy Electron app

Sure. My point is polish isn’t a reason closed source sells and attracts investment. Folks will pay for terrible UX. (Including users.)

	▲	aspenmayer a day ago \| parent [-]
		Closed source sells because open source devs don't know sales or marketing. In many cases, developers are the only users that the devs even acknowledge. Just look at the successful/popular open source projects. There are nearly no paid open source apps, though most of everything is turning into software as a service. Open source is built in such a way as to make outside investment very difficult to justify by most private investors. Why pay good money for something you already get for free? This is a flawed metaphor, because investors aren't purchasing anything, as investment isn't a transaction, but I think that's why we don't see more sales and investment in open source. It seems fundamentally ill-suited toward those aims and ends. I think successful open source businesses are outliers, and as such are pretty interesting. The only recently founded one I can think of that does hardware is Flipper Zero. I'm sure there are others. I'd be curious about who others think are the outliers in this reading, as those are folks whose work I'd love to hear about.

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queenkjuul a day ago | parent | prev [-]

People buy discord nitro, though

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api 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Slack is an example of a user-centric open protocol?

Slack proves my point. It's closed and vertically integrated and people pay for it. Nobody paid for the open precursors to Slack so they stagnated.

	▲	2 days ago \| parent [-]
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