There's still a significant amount of useful Windows-only software out there. The lock-in effect is growing weaker as other platforms develop competitors and particularly as online services displace desktop software for a lot of users, but it's still there.
Your argument seems to be broken given that Windows is paid for up-front and we're talking about security fixes that are fundamental defects in the original product here.
Also, probably the most popular desktop Linux distro now does offer 10-year support on its LTS releases.
Interesting. I've noticed a few sites and video channels relying on Patreon in recent times, but wasn't aware of the controversy. More details or relevant links, please?
Unfortunately, the responses in cases like the GDPR and VAT MOSS didn't have much respect for proportionality. The risk of a small business with contact details for 500 customers it had last year being hacked are hardly the same magnitude as the risks of an international payment service with millions of people's credit card details in its database. The risk of a company that only sold €25,000 to customers in the EU setting up international subsidiaries to save a few percent of VAT is hardly the same as a giant like Amazon doing so. And yet the small businesses are faced with much the same rules and disproportionate overheads, which has a horrible chilling effect when you multiply it by the number of times this happens.
So I will respectfully disagree with the "this is why we can't have nice things" argument. Legal systems have recognised the concept of de minimis harm since forever. So have numerous global treaties, for that matter. The EU is exceptionally bad at aiming at perceived abuses by big businesses but failing to notice all the smaller businesses being taken out as collateral damage. But if it then fails to even achieve its intended result in terms of curtailing abuses by bigger businesses, that's just adding insult to injury, so if it's going to have dubious laws like the GDPR, it had better at least use them to do some "greater good" or the whole thing was just a damaging waste of time.
The device I really want is something with roughly the format and feature set of a modern smartphone, but with the software emphasis entirely on standard communications apps (call, send message, browse web, check email, etc.) and useful hardware features (photo/video recording, torch, GPS) rather than "app store apps" where 99.999% of them are junkware and the few useful ones could be done almost as well connecting to ordinary web sites from a browser with reasonable security and privacy. Sadly, no-one seems to make that device, so the options are old school feature phones (which have served me well for a long time, but aren't as convenient in some practical respects) or current smartphones (which are a security, privacy and reliability nightmare for the reasons we all know).
Given how much trouble the GDPR caused for small, honest businesses just to update their documentation and processes just to get the formalities right even if nothing materially changed about their actual data processing, the regulators had better at least use the new powers it gives to get some good out of it.
Of course, the GDPR came into effect less than a year ago, and the regulators are reportedly already applying stronger penalties in some cases. However, it seems likely that they're waiting for a headline case to make a point before they start issuing the first really big fines. What better case could there be than a data-hoarding giant like Facebook covertly collecting and processing sensitive personal data, which is a special category under the GDPR that includes health data and that has stricter rules about when processing is allowed?
Given that Apple's sales are way down for their high-end phones, to the point where they are openly talking about having to reduce prices, I think your information may be a little out of date.
Isn't PayPal regulated as a bank at least in Europe these days?
That said, they do have a terrible reputation for how they treat merchants, particularly in the case of any disputes, and for that reason alone we ruled them out almost immediately for our businesses. People do occasionally ask if we have plans to support them, but nowhere near often enough to make us reconsider.
PayPal hasn't ended credit cards, so it's doubtful that Google or Amazon would do so overnight either. They could certainly inflict considerable damage though, and they surely have the resources to deal with the regulatory overheads of becoming a financial service.
I don't know if you're the same AC who replied to me elsewhere, but you do seem to be making the same mistake of confusing personal opinion with professional experience. You keep talking about questions and beliefs and perceptions, but professionals will go to considerable lengths so they don't need to speculate.
Professionals want hard data from demographic surveys, in-person interviews with customers and prospects, and the like. They have resources to collect that data, so they can make informed decisions based on evidence. If those professionals conclude that young adults are not a promising target market for what they have to offer, they are also going to conclude that advertising on sites like Reddit may not be the most cost-effective strategy. Which brings us back to where we started...
At the risk of invoking a cliche, it really isn't personal and it really is just business. It is essentially a matter of fact, found time and again across numerous products and services, and discussed time and again among the business community, that as a group today's young adults fit that mould.
Now, of course it's a stereotype. Of course there are exceptions and an entire generation of people is not the same. This is understood. It is also, to be blunt, not very interesting in this context. We are talking about a numbers game, because that is ultimately what both economics and business come down to.
To that end, professionals are looking at the issue dispassionately and will want to make objectively the best decisions that they can with the facts available and the goals they have been asked to achieve. It isn't personal, because specific individuals and their individual views are basically irrelevant to that decision-making process.
You seem to be reading something personal into my words that I'm not saying. All I'm commenting on here is the relative difficulty Reddit is going to face extracting value from its user base if half of those users are 18-24s. I'm not expressing any opinion on the ethics of any particular product or service, nor claiming that those 18-24s should or shouldn't be interested in this or that offering. But if they're not, then Reddit has an uphill struggle to convince businesses with those offerings to spend their marketing budget on Reddit ads.
There is a delightful irony in one group of people using the phrase "entitlement culture" to describe another group who won't give them money.
There's nothing wrong with one group choosing not to give the other money. The term "entitlement culture" usually refers to one of those groups choosing not to give the other [much] money but expecting something of [greater] value in return anyway.
We've been having this debate about areas like copyright and piracy for a long time. Today, similar issues also arise with business models like ad-funded online services or freemium pricing. Relevant example: People who spend several hours a day using social networks at no direct cost, yet object to the ad systems that indirectly fund those same social networks.
Don't get me wrong: I couldn't agree more with almost everything you're saying. And personally, I too prefer to pay an honest, clear price for something up-front instead of having it wrapped up in lock-in deals and so on. As I mentioned elsewhere, I don't even have accounts on most of the big social networking sites, in part because I don't believe I fully understand how they operate and what the consequences are or might become.
Unfortunately, almost none of this is true for the average person in the 18-24 age group today. As you say, it's all about instant gratification now, even if that sometimes means going against their own best interests. The rules of the game are different with this generation, and even if you try to play by the new rules, a lot of them will still cheat if they get the chance. That's just the dominant cultural trend. And that's why I wouldn't personally want to run a business that was primarily aimed at this market. It's a high-variability game where a few businesses are going to become very rich and everyone else is going to become very gone after losing money.
Apart from that they have little money, how is the rest a downside?
In a word, inconsistency. We are living in a time when a single tweet by a reality TV star can wipe a billion dollars off the market cap of a social network. It's tough to justify investing significant budget to build something new and different, even if it's getting great feedback during initial experiments, when it could literally be everyone's must-have today and everyone's once-had tomorrow. From a business point of view, less impulsive markets are much easier to plan for and carry much lower risk.
I can't remember exactly where someone linked me to recent stats, but it was only a few days ago, so if I come across that discussion again I'll post the link here.
In any case, the businesses with billions to spend on ads aren't wasting money understanding their market. But they're also perfectly willing to pull multi-million Facebook ad spends when Facebook change their algorithms and returns take a hit. If Facebook ads were so much more effective, Coke wouldn't have been running all those carefully chosen TV slots over Christmas and instead everyone's social media feeds would have been full of ads for cola during the holiday season.
Socially and culturally, you may well be right and the trend may be a healthy one.
However, in this discussion, we were previously talking about the economics of the situation. A lot of those experiences are only cheap/free because they are being subsidised in some other way, and sooner or later, someone still has to pony up some real money so the people working to provide those experiences can pay the rent too.
Usually that happens through one of two mechanisms. One is some sort of disguised or indirect payment, like the cost of the ludicrously expensive tiny computer in your pocket being hidden behind monthly phone service plan, or the cost of ad-funded online service behind hidden behind purchases of the advertised items. The other common arrangement is that someone else is footing the bill, as with freemium models, free-to-play mobile games with in-app purchases, or pirated music/movies/games/shows where legal purchases are covering the costs.
To some extent these may overlap, particularly in terms of who winds up buying advertised items. In any case, the common theme is that if the true source of revenue dries up, everything it was indirectly funding dries up too.
I am personally a sceptic about relying too much on ad-funded content as a business model, particularly online. It's clear which way the winds are blowing in terms of ad-blockers, and while it was possible for a while for those who didn't know how to block to subsidise those who did, that model isn't sustainable as knowledge grows. I don't expect that shutting interested visitors with ad blockers down with some snotty "You need to disable your ad blocker to read this article" kind of message is going to work either, because hardly anyone really wants to read much of anything so badly that they won't just close the tab at that point.
Perhaps I'm something of a hypocrite, because while my own businesses charge real money for what they offer, including online, and while I personally don't have accounts on sites like Facebook because I value my privacy enough to choose not to, my businesses do advertise on some of those sites (among other places). But then as long as everyone is genuinely informed of what's going on and in the case of social network the users are trading their privacy willingly for the services they value in return, I don't see a moral dilemma here.
The entire marketing industry has difficulty getting money out of young adults. This is mostly because young adults don't have much money. It's a market with a few runaway success stories (name one 20 year old you know who doesn't have an expensive smartphone, even if the cost is hidden behind a monthly plan) and then a very long tail of trying to extract blood from a stone.
Slashdot Mirror
There's still a significant amount of useful Windows-only software out there. The lock-in effect is growing weaker as other platforms develop competitors and particularly as online services displace desktop software for a lot of users, but it's still there.
CSS is meant to make pages prettier.
That's one thing it can do, but CSS is also the main tool for setting up different page layouts, and not everything has to be a rectangular grid.
Your argument seems to be broken given that Windows is paid for up-front and we're talking about security fixes that are fundamental defects in the original product here.
Also, probably the most popular desktop Linux distro now does offer 10-year support on its LTS releases.
If she files a suit or not is the key to finding out what actually happened.
That's easy to say, but not so easy to do, particularly when you're now stuck in another country.
Thanks. I had no idea they'd upset so many people over the past couple of years.
Interesting. I've noticed a few sites and video channels relying on Patreon in recent times, but wasn't aware of the controversy. More details or relevant links, please?
Unfortunately, the responses in cases like the GDPR and VAT MOSS didn't have much respect for proportionality. The risk of a small business with contact details for 500 customers it had last year being hacked are hardly the same magnitude as the risks of an international payment service with millions of people's credit card details in its database. The risk of a company that only sold €25,000 to customers in the EU setting up international subsidiaries to save a few percent of VAT is hardly the same as a giant like Amazon doing so. And yet the small businesses are faced with much the same rules and disproportionate overheads, which has a horrible chilling effect when you multiply it by the number of times this happens.
So I will respectfully disagree with the "this is why we can't have nice things" argument. Legal systems have recognised the concept of de minimis harm since forever. So have numerous global treaties, for that matter. The EU is exceptionally bad at aiming at perceived abuses by big businesses but failing to notice all the smaller businesses being taken out as collateral damage. But if it then fails to even achieve its intended result in terms of curtailing abuses by bigger businesses, that's just adding insult to injury, so if it's going to have dubious laws like the GDPR, it had better at least use them to do some "greater good" or the whole thing was just a damaging waste of time.
The device I really want is something with roughly the format and feature set of a modern smartphone, but with the software emphasis entirely on standard communications apps (call, send message, browse web, check email, etc.) and useful hardware features (photo/video recording, torch, GPS) rather than "app store apps" where 99.999% of them are junkware and the few useful ones could be done almost as well connecting to ordinary web sites from a browser with reasonable security and privacy. Sadly, no-one seems to make that device, so the options are old school feature phones (which have served me well for a long time, but aren't as convenient in some practical respects) or current smartphones (which are a security, privacy and reliability nightmare for the reasons we all know).
Given how much trouble the GDPR caused for small, honest businesses just to update their documentation and processes just to get the formalities right even if nothing materially changed about their actual data processing, the regulators had better at least use the new powers it gives to get some good out of it.
Of course, the GDPR came into effect less than a year ago, and the regulators are reportedly already applying stronger penalties in some cases. However, it seems likely that they're waiting for a headline case to make a point before they start issuing the first really big fines. What better case could there be than a data-hoarding giant like Facebook covertly collecting and processing sensitive personal data, which is a special category under the GDPR that includes health data and that has stricter rules about when processing is allowed?
Given that Apple's sales are way down for their high-end phones, to the point where they are openly talking about having to reduce prices, I think your information may be a little out of date.
Isn't PayPal regulated as a bank at least in Europe these days?
That said, they do have a terrible reputation for how they treat merchants, particularly in the case of any disputes, and for that reason alone we ruled them out almost immediately for our businesses. People do occasionally ask if we have plans to support them, but nowhere near often enough to make us reconsider.
And this is why there are sneaky terms in a lot of the relevant contracts prohibiting price discrimination.
Which in turn is why fees have then been capped by law in some places.
PayPal hasn't ended credit cards, so it's doubtful that Google or Amazon would do so overnight either. They could certainly inflict considerable damage though, and they surely have the resources to deal with the regulatory overheads of becoming a financial service.
I don't know if you're the same AC who replied to me elsewhere, but you do seem to be making the same mistake of confusing personal opinion with professional experience. You keep talking about questions and beliefs and perceptions, but professionals will go to considerable lengths so they don't need to speculate.
Professionals want hard data from demographic surveys, in-person interviews with customers and prospects, and the like. They have resources to collect that data, so they can make informed decisions based on evidence. If those professionals conclude that young adults are not a promising target market for what they have to offer, they are also going to conclude that advertising on sites like Reddit may not be the most cost-effective strategy. Which brings us back to where we started...
At the risk of invoking a cliche, it really isn't personal and it really is just business. It is essentially a matter of fact, found time and again across numerous products and services, and discussed time and again among the business community, that as a group today's young adults fit that mould.
Now, of course it's a stereotype. Of course there are exceptions and an entire generation of people is not the same. This is understood. It is also, to be blunt, not very interesting in this context. We are talking about a numbers game, because that is ultimately what both economics and business come down to.
To that end, professionals are looking at the issue dispassionately and will want to make objectively the best decisions that they can with the facts available and the goals they have been asked to achieve. It isn't personal, because specific individuals and their individual views are basically irrelevant to that decision-making process.
You seem to be reading something personal into my words that I'm not saying. All I'm commenting on here is the relative difficulty Reddit is going to face extracting value from its user base if half of those users are 18-24s. I'm not expressing any opinion on the ethics of any particular product or service, nor claiming that those 18-24s should or shouldn't be interested in this or that offering. But if they're not, then Reddit has an uphill struggle to convince businesses with those offerings to spend their marketing budget on Reddit ads.
I'm not blaming anyone for anything. I'm just observing the economic reality.
There is a delightful irony in one group of people using the phrase "entitlement culture" to describe another group who won't give them money.
There's nothing wrong with one group choosing not to give the other money. The term "entitlement culture" usually refers to one of those groups choosing not to give the other [much] money but expecting something of [greater] value in return anyway.
We've been having this debate about areas like copyright and piracy for a long time. Today, similar issues also arise with business models like ad-funded online services or freemium pricing. Relevant example: People who spend several hours a day using social networks at no direct cost, yet object to the ad systems that indirectly fund those same social networks.
Don't get me wrong: I couldn't agree more with almost everything you're saying. And personally, I too prefer to pay an honest, clear price for something up-front instead of having it wrapped up in lock-in deals and so on. As I mentioned elsewhere, I don't even have accounts on most of the big social networking sites, in part because I don't believe I fully understand how they operate and what the consequences are or might become.
Unfortunately, almost none of this is true for the average person in the 18-24 age group today. As you say, it's all about instant gratification now, even if that sometimes means going against their own best interests. The rules of the game are different with this generation, and even if you try to play by the new rules, a lot of them will still cheat if they get the chance. That's just the dominant cultural trend. And that's why I wouldn't personally want to run a business that was primarily aimed at this market. It's a high-variability game where a few businesses are going to become very rich and everyone else is going to become very gone after losing money.
Apart from that they have little money, how is the rest a downside?
In a word, inconsistency. We are living in a time when a single tweet by a reality TV star can wipe a billion dollars off the market cap of a social network. It's tough to justify investing significant budget to build something new and different, even if it's getting great feedback during initial experiments, when it could literally be everyone's must-have today and everyone's once-had tomorrow. From a business point of view, less impulsive markets are much easier to plan for and carry much lower risk.
I can't remember exactly where someone linked me to recent stats, but it was only a few days ago, so if I come across that discussion again I'll post the link here.
In any case, the businesses with billions to spend on ads aren't wasting money understanding their market. But they're also perfectly willing to pull multi-million Facebook ad spends when Facebook change their algorithms and returns take a hit. If Facebook ads were so much more effective, Coke wouldn't have been running all those carefully chosen TV slots over Christmas and instead everyone's social media feeds would have been full of ads for cola during the holiday season.
Socially and culturally, you may well be right and the trend may be a healthy one.
However, in this discussion, we were previously talking about the economics of the situation. A lot of those experiences are only cheap/free because they are being subsidised in some other way, and sooner or later, someone still has to pony up some real money so the people working to provide those experiences can pay the rent too.
Usually that happens through one of two mechanisms. One is some sort of disguised or indirect payment, like the cost of the ludicrously expensive tiny computer in your pocket being hidden behind monthly phone service plan, or the cost of ad-funded online service behind hidden behind purchases of the advertised items. The other common arrangement is that someone else is footing the bill, as with freemium models, free-to-play mobile games with in-app purchases, or pirated music/movies/games/shows where legal purchases are covering the costs.
To some extent these may overlap, particularly in terms of who winds up buying advertised items. In any case, the common theme is that if the true source of revenue dries up, everything it was indirectly funding dries up too.
Thank you. I haven't laughed so hard since I was about the age of those kids.
I am personally a sceptic about relying too much on ad-funded content as a business model, particularly online. It's clear which way the winds are blowing in terms of ad-blockers, and while it was possible for a while for those who didn't know how to block to subsidise those who did, that model isn't sustainable as knowledge grows. I don't expect that shutting interested visitors with ad blockers down with some snotty "You need to disable your ad blocker to read this article" kind of message is going to work either, because hardly anyone really wants to read much of anything so badly that they won't just close the tab at that point.
Perhaps I'm something of a hypocrite, because while my own businesses charge real money for what they offer, including online, and while I personally don't have accounts on sites like Facebook because I value my privacy enough to choose not to, my businesses do advertise on some of those sites (among other places). But then as long as everyone is genuinely informed of what's going on and in the case of social network the users are trading their privacy willingly for the services they value in return, I don't see a moral dilemma here.
The entire marketing industry has difficulty getting money out of young adults. This is mostly because young adults don't have much money. It's a market with a few runaway success stories (name one 20 year old you know who doesn't have an expensive smartphone, even if the cost is hidden behind a monthly plan) and then a very long tail of trying to extract blood from a stone.