I am quite sure that Microsoft Corporation will be sued … successfully … and forced to abandon their notions of switching to an “ad supported” business model. They provide something without which a computer cannot fulfill its purpose. In effect, it is the engine and the drive-train of the car. This does not give them the privilege of putting advertisements on my computer.
(Never mind the corporate customers who are the company’s bread-and-butter.)
In the bigger picture of things, I am already very-plainly seeing a shift away from the blind, uninformed acceptance of the distribution of personal information. At a camping trip, I talked with a dozen people who had closed their Facebook identities, and who told storekeepers, “no, you don’t need my phone number … you only need to accept my cash.”
“Ad supported business models” are not business models at all. They are only a vain attempt to counter the reality that most Internet strategies that are being touted today … do not yield revenue at all. It’s very easy to find articles such as this one, which says:
more than half of the app developers they spoke to make less than $500 a month from their paid apps. And for developers that develop free apps that are funded through advertising, the picture is even grimmer. According to the study, those developers make less than $100 a month in ad revenue.
“My <<whatever-it-is>> is not a television.” (In fact, I have not owned a television in more than 30 years.) I block all advertisements, and in any case I have never bought a single thing in response to an internet advertisement.
Actually … I even got rid of :eek: my “smart” phone, after it “butt-dialed ‘911’ three times” while I was mowing the pasture. (Yes, even though the management of mobile-app projects is part of my daily-bread job, and even though I therefore have a drawer-ful of “test machines.”)
David Gewirtz wrote this interesting article, where he said:
But the problem with the app market is that prices have been pushed down so much that you can buy an app for less than you’d pay for a can of soda. For the app software business to be profitable, then, you need to sell as many apps as the soda companies sell cans of soda. For most app developers, that’s not happening.In fact, most smartphone owners never, ever download an app. According to a study reported by our own Adrian Kingsley-Hughes , “the entire app ecosystem is being driven by about one-third of smartphone owners, with seven percent of owners downloading nearly half of all the apps.”
(He wrote that article in a good follow-up to this one, where once-again he is totally candid:
Those numbers also raise the specter of something called a “discoverability challenge.” In other words, how will people find your app? Notice I haven’t even talked about whether doing an app is economically viable, or whether lack of technical skills is an issue. I’m just asking a basic question: how will users find this thing?
The cold reality is that “they probably won’t.” Even in 2012, it was observed that 60% of app-store apps have never been downloaded. (At the time, this was about 400,000.)
Other stats are equally grim: one in four apps are abandoned after a single use.
Identical statistics can readily be found for e-books (of all types) and downloadable music (in all stores.)
In short, “the ‘glam’ of The Internet” is now on a collision course with “the ‘reality’ of The Sales Game.”
Once again, Apple knew exactly what it was doing when it sold the right to develop apps for their iOS platform. They knew that everyone on Planet Earth would pay them $50, even though a large percent of them would never even earn that $50 back. Ever.
I have a somewhat-curious perspective on this, because, 19(!) years ago now, I “happened upon” a very-niche tool idea (ChimneySweep®), which at the time I never thought would amount to much. I wrote a tool that I personally needed, started talking about it on Usenet news-groups, successively improved it, and “did very well, although I still do not drive a Porsche.” (Even today, copies continue to sell, and license revenue continues to come in.) There were five things, I think, that most contributed to that success:
- The product (still) fills a practical need. If you have a Paradox/BDE (or dBase/Clipper/FoxPro) database, this product can probably repair it, automatically.
- The product costs between $150 and $400 a copy.
- The product went through (so far) six “releases,” and owners of previous releases had to pay for later ones, although they received a generous discount.
- (Perhaps most importantly of all …) There were no “free trials.” (A “10 tables for 10 days” program died almost immediately.) You pay $35 for the privilege of even trying it … this entire amount can be applied, within 30 days, to a permanent-license purchase.
I very quickly learned to hold my hand out, requiring a sustainable amount of money to be put into it, and to turn away those who would not pay. I also very quickly learned to use “only online distribution.” No retailers, no (more) floppy-disks or CDs, no more printed manuals.
It was “a self-sustaining business model,” and many thousands of customers (thank you!) sustain(ed) it. No, it didn’t make me rich. But, it did pay the costs necessary to allow me to provide the product’s benefits to thousands of companies (and OEM licensees) all over Planet Earth … and it still hasn’t stopped, although of course it has slowed down considerably.
“Apps,” “e-books,” and “music” all faced the identical fundamental problem: how to get people who were accustomed to “visiting a web-site ‘for free’” to switch to something (an “app”) that, due to development and distribution differences, was actually “costly.” They found out, the hard way, that the consumer was not actually willing to buy anything.
Think about it: you might pay 4 times as much for a single cup of coffee than you pay for an app … if you pay for the app at all, which you probably don’t. You understand that, tomorrow, you’ll buy another cup, and pay another $4. Yet you profess to be “outraged” to pay for ‘an app,’ let alone to be asked to pay for an upgrade? Talk about it over today’s $30 dinner, or tomorrow’s another-$30 dinner.
This is not “a business model.” It’s a one-way ticket to the poor-house … and “advertising” will not save you.
There are … millions of “you schlebs” (sorry) out there, waiting for your Golden Ticket to arrive and wondering where-the-hell it went. Welcome to real markets. Turns out that the game hasn’t changed much.
Face it: the sellers of mobile hardware consciously removed all “barriers to entry,” glowingly promising a share of a huge pie “to everyone,” well-knowing (a) that only a tiny percentage of the people they were speaking to would ever see it, but also knowing (b) that almost every one of them didn’t know that (yet). So, they sold tickets. Just like the “photographers, whores, and hardware salesmen” … rich men, all … who sat on the docks of San Francisco and Seattle and waved good-bye to the 49’ers, then went back to count their (real) fortunes.
All of them knew that you’d never find a nugget. But, all of them knew that you were certain that you would. And therefore, all of them knew that they had something to sell you, and that you’d be a long, long way away from either city when you went broke.
“Old Age and Treachery will outdistance Youth and Vigor, every time.”