Hacker News Reader

Comment by therealmarv | Hacker News Reader

Desktop is for sure at the end of the hype cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle but that does not mean that you cannot make money or not be successful when you write a very good software or you hit a particular niche. And I would not fear Google or Apple, I cannot remember when Google did the last time a rich and good desktop app for end consumers (was it Picasa, the last one?) and the only big professional desktop app I use from Apple (beside the OS) is Final Cut Pro. They (Apple & Google) do not compete a lot on the desktop applications software market.

IMHO it may be even easier in desktop market than in the high competing mobile market where people want everything for free or at very low price. TL;DR Desktop will not die and there will never be a time were you can say "Everything is done".

View on HN

I hope desktop software will make a comeback, because the current situation with web-based applications is ridiculous - you pay on a monthly basis, but at the same time it can disappear the next month and you'll be left with nothing. With desktop software at least you pay once and can use it forever - just because an app is old doesn't mean it's suddenly "bad", if it serves your purpose and you mastered it over the years than why should you change it every few years?

Speaking as a user of Adobe and Autodesk software, I wish this was still the case with desktop products...

I'm going to continue to use CS6 for as long as I can, because of the shift to the ephemeral subscription model. So far I still haven't felt the need to upgrade, but then again I don't do anything too crazy with them.

> TL;DR Desktop will not die and there will never be a time were you can say "Everything is done".

Generally I'd agree with that. However, from a business point of view I am not sure whether writing desktop software is still generating good profits. I guess there is room for industry specific software. But I doubt there is much money in the end consumer market. Especially since piracy is probably still a big problem. I once contemplated whether adonation based model might encourage more people to pay for software but according to my web research it is not a good idea. Apart from Tarn Adams (The developer of Dwarf Fortress), who makes a living off donations (but he's working crazy hours iirc) there's not much reason for hope out there. Wavosaur, for instance, is a great wave editor. However, the money people donate is just enough to pay for webspace. [0]

[0]http://www.wavosaur.com/donation.php ; yes, there is also audacity which is free but in my experience it is still very prone to crashing and thus imo not as good.

Just an anectdote: I've made several apps for Android and Windows phone, but the only place I've made money is on Windows Desktop (an outlook plugin of all things). People seems to be more accustomed to having to pay real money for software on desktop. Don't even think about the donation route

Since industry specific software is (and has always been) a much larger business than the end consumer market, the health of the off-shelf software market is not a big indication.

The majority of software engineers work on industry-specific internal software. Parts of it are also switching from desktop to web or mobile solutions, but it's important to note that most of the development would not be affected even if sales of consumer-aimed software approach zero.

You make a good point, a Picasa is sorely needed.

Funnily, Google [itself] has discountinued its "desktop search engine", which is a great pity, as there have been no decent alternatives and then, what do you do when you need to search, say, a document database, consisting of some .xlsx and .docx files (which are essentially compressed XML files, as I get it)?

I too miss GDS and its related offerings. Lately Windows built-in search has impressed me though.

I also had great hopes for nepomuk on KDE but I think that is discontinued now.

Nepomuk has been replaced with Baloo, which is very much alive, way more performant and integrates well.

Thanks! Always liked KDE so nice to read.

For finding files within Windows, there's Everything[0], which is pretty fast and small (just one .EXE file).

[0]: http://voidtools.com/

I've used this, it is pretty fast comparing windows search. Any idea on how it differs from windows search?

try https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/ with https://github.com/koniu/recoll-webui

Reply on news.ycombinator.com