Windows 8 is just another way for Microsoft to show you ads

I love the products Google provides (disclosure: I've been a heavy user of Google products since GMail was invite-only) but I have no delusions that they're providing all of these products in part to drive people back through their advertising revenue stream.

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Whats more they try to justify it with sickeningly transparent lies like ads being "Content users are demanding" now.

• The S/N got astonishingly better.

• The time spent on it was much lower.

• What I got out of it was more nuanced, and impacted me more deeply.

Now, a few other things happened: I missed some things, some of which was good (well-reasoned debates on HN, for example), some of which was the equivalent of junk food (tech news updates), but still not without some utility and applicability.

I also decided some of my subscription content really wasn't worth it, because it started to feel an awful lot closer to the ad supported stuff I'd just detox'd off of, than the higher quality stuff I was paying for.

I also missed some really, really good 'blogs from people who are respected industry figures, and run the 'blog more to make sure they stay respected industry figures, than to directly profit from them. Those are back in the (much reduced) fray.

Which is all to say: I think if we paid directly for the content we consumed on TV, it could work out OK. And, once the industry realizes its model is unsustainable, everything will cost less to produce, and, hopefully, buy. (Think of sending $5-7 to an artist for their album, as opposed to paying ≥$10-15 to pay a lot of guys whose ability to add value is ever declining.) I'd just as soon watch 2-3 really superb TV shows per week and pay $100-300/year than spend that (or more) for the same stuff, plus a whole lot of noise and bloat. I think we'd come out of the other end better for it, and with more to show.

At the risk of being hastily axiomatic, I could say that everyone's beholden to someone. Or, at least, content creators who want to be paid for their work, are. I'd rather they be primarily beholden to the customer, than to the advertiser, or the political climate and/or government, etc. Any other arrangement, to me, seems too compromised, if for no other reason than because a direct wallet-vote seems to be the most powerful.

Photoshop is an interesting example to me, because I count Photoshop as another model that has had to change with the times: it used to be for pure professionals only, at a time when professionals often worked for companies that bought their licenses. Like the sports tickets of software. Crazy expensive, but if you did it as a full-time job, it was more than easily absorbed. After all, it required expensive (and technically challenging) hardware to run it on, so that barrier was already crossed by potential customers.

Today, everyone's a designer. Alright, that's not a fair assessment, but the number of people who have design skills–ranging from minor editing to some real mind-blowing stuff–but don't depend on them to feed their family, is astonishingly high compared to just a couple of decades ago. People who never consider themselves graphic artists find a lot of utility value in Photoshop, or one of its offshoots.

So its old price point, relative to everything else, just doesn't make sense if broad adoption is their goal, unless they're totally happy to capture just the pure pro crowd, who, for perspective, can run it quite handily on hardware that costs what a night or two in a mid-grade hotel in any big city does. The technical and cost barriers have fallen dramatically.

So that's changing.

Now, consider if Photoshop were ad-supported, and had been so for long enough to where designers grew up with that being the new normal.

Then, imagine someone comes out with an ad-free image-editing program, with no ads, that costs a reasonable amount. In some ways, better than Photoshop, in other ways, probably not as specialized, not as built-out, but pretty solid.

I think there's a market there for the taking.

Adobe's trying to strike that balance, and I'm not here to say whether or not they're doing a good job at it with their current approach (that's a much longer post and I doubt my ability to think about it as clearly as I believe I can other segments of the industry), but my point is that well-made products at a reasonable price is something I still want to believe there's a huge market for.

And we tend to underestimate it because of all the sub-par stuff, our conditioning to which we don't even realize.

I'd like to think that enough humanity still has the innate thoughtfulness to be slightly skeptical when being pitched to trade hours of their life (that is, the money they earned by working) for a given product, to provide a market for it.

And if we've all reached the point where we'll happily trade our time, attention spans, compromise our abilities to focus and concentrate, and reveal a wealth of personal data so as to pay a bit less, well, then we get what we deserve. But that's probably outside the scope of this particular comment.

Edit: Fixed a typo.

I would gladly pay say 30$ a month for Hulu without adds and some people would pay 100$ a month for the same privilege, but the option is simply not there. Netflix is currently cheap and add free, but the compete for the same content which puts a lot of pressure on Netflix to insert advertising just like DVD/Blue-ray etc and just about every other way to see most of this stuff.