Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

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Also, people who pay for the software are not the same ones who use it / care about the quality. This may mean different things too:

- when outlook sucks, you're likely not the one who bought it for the company and they in turn likely don't even have a choice - it's a requirement

- when your company accounting package sucks, again you're unlikely to be the one who decided to buy it - it's a company / budget / b2b sales decision

- when the printer driver is bloated and sucks for 10k reasons, you're not the one who paid for it - you bought the printer, the company producing the printer bought the driver (paid for creation to requirements) and you don't get a choice

- etc. etc.

For a single person it's hard to bargain using money. I won't pay for Windows. My laptop came with it anyway and part of the price went back to MS. Even if I cared about the quality of Windows, there's nothing I can do at this point to influence it.

The big software packages are just completely detached from their users at this point. As long as they match requirements and don't break on global scale, they're not going to change.

Time for a car comparison.

People frequently will pay extra for high quality (or at least the perception of it). The problem is that in the presence of network effects, they usually won't.

Cars are a great example here: they're expensive, they're complex, and there's a huge number of different models available. If you just want the cheapest thing available, you can go buy a Chevy Spark or whatever the current bargain-basement model is. But people don't, they'll spend more money on a Japanese car because they think (rightly so, IMO, and also based on reliability records) it's higher quality and more reliable than an American-brand car, even though it costs more to get one with similar features. Or they'll buy a German car for similar reasons.

But when you buy a Honda or BMW instead of a Chevy, this isn't going to hurt you in any way: you'll be able to drive on all the same streets, park in the same parking spaces, etc. You might have a more limited selection of mechanics.

Same goes for, say, clothing or shoes. You can buy some cheap crap from Walmart, or spend a lot more for something else. But you're not going to be prevented from walking into a certain restaurant because you bought a $100 pair of shoes instead of a crappy $15 pair of shoes.

This isn't the case with software. If you decide Windows is horrible junk (esp. with Windows 10 and its spyware) and decide not to use it, you're suddenly going to be prevented from using a lot of software.

You could influence Windows by buying a Mac instead. And arguably that has happened. Before OS X started taking off, Windows Longhorn was about trying to do object oriented filesystems and other stuff. It ended up as Vista, with semi-transparent window borders.

Really interesting perspective. In this example, external competition created a worse product than if they were left as a stagnating monopoly?

Before OS X the Windows team were hardly focused on the UI at all. OO filesystems weren't going anywhere. At least Vista shipped and had some new features.

> OO filesystems weren't going anywhere.

Really? Have we forgotten Smalltalk machines so quickly?

Smalltalk machines?

The question is not did we forget, but who had anything to remember about them in the first place?

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