91–100 of 176 posts
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I’m seeing less and less developers buy Macs...
In favor of linux? Chrome books?
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> the platform that developers want to support is the one that wins. This is very hard to believe. Developers hate apple, facebook, and countless other platforms that are doing very well. Adoption is the fundamental problem, not what developers want to support. The platform with the most users is what people will develop for.
"Developers hate apple, facebook, and countless other platforms that are doing very well. " No, most developers don't hate anything. Most developers are just normal people makin' stuff because their company pays them to. Most developers are not particularly ideological. Just some of us are ... perhaps a little bit more than in other industries.
Facebook is legendary for introducing breaking changes to their API without warning, for having terrible documentation, baroque and inconsistent APIs, flaky behaviour and broken examples.
Whatever you think of Facebook the company, Facebook the API is something everyone I know has horror stories about.
The problem with your personal data store is that it will be impossible to stop the large companies like Google/Facebook from simply copying and caching a copy of all the data they need to access. You give them permission to handle your email and calendar information and bingo, they have a copy of your entire set of emails and appointments. If you use multiple services from Google/Facebook then they will end up with…
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I think you may be in a bubble. Many developers like apple, and facebook enough to work for them. In fact, its that which keeps both platforms viable in the face of stiff competiton and shallow moats.
Facebook has a shallow moat? People only use it at all because of the network effect. And Apple's main draw is the large number of affluent customers. They'll have developers as long as they have those users, whether the developers like it or not. Which is why they can get away with charging 30% to developers when platforms have historically given incentives to developers to develop for their platform.
Apple was successful in building a platform because it's in house developers were capable of putting together something that was popolar with many people. They built on that to make more money by allowing other developers to use their platform.
However two things come to mind:
1. Competency is not a moat. If Apple loses developers it's next product will not be so much better than competition that it's success will maintain against erosion.
2. For all people talk about associating with necessary evils; when you associate with someone long enough, you begin to think they are not evil. Thus it seems reasonable to think developers do not hate Apple, if they work with Apple.
The internet and web are already decentralised technical solutions.
But self-hosting is not a feasible solution for people and network effects mean that they'll gravitate to a few platforms.
That's simply the way it is.
Google, Facebook, etc. naturally emerged and similar near-monopolies will emerge with any other technology providing a decentralised network, including Solid.
Given the tendency for wealth and power to concentrate, is it possible to design a competitive, and efficient system where all the actors are sufficiently prosperous without the formation of any monopolies/duopolies/oligopolies? Edit: a follow-up thought. If the answer is no or "it's too hard", then is it possible have something along the same lines, is it possible for the proposed system to self-correct away from mo…
Your second point is the critical one, and I'll add to it — there must be an incentive to decentralize, and it must outweigh the numerous incentives to re-centralize. We need to centralize around protocols/standards and decentralize ownership of data. If somehow each piece of data on a user were exponentially more expensive to keep, that might be possible. But that would be a very strange law…
there are a few other things too like only being charged to upload files once vs paying a subscription for the rest of your life, or only needing one password for all sites.
The problem with your personal data store is that it will be impossible to stop the large companies like Google/Facebook from simply copying and caching a copy of all the data they need to access. You give them permission to handle your email and calendar information and bingo, they have a copy of your entire set of emails and appointments. If you use multiple services from Google/Facebook then they will end up with…
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> the platform that developers want to support is the one that wins. This is very hard to believe. Developers hate apple, facebook, and countless other platforms that are doing very well. Adoption is the fundamental problem, not what developers want to support. The platform with the most users is what people will develop for.
"Developers hate apple, facebook, and countless other platforms that are doing very well. " No, most developers don't hate anything. Most developers are just normal people makin' stuff because their company pays them to. Most developers are not particularly ideological. Just some of us are ... perhaps a little bit more than in other industries.
And normal people do have feelings. So they like or love the things they do, or despise or even hate them. Unless they became mindles zombies along the way.. which happens, but much more common is rather that they project all the other negative feelings into technology X or Y ... at least it often seems like this, when I read another rant about the technology Z.
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> the platform that developers want to support is the one that wins. This is very hard to believe. Developers hate apple, facebook, and countless other platforms that are doing very well. Adoption is the fundamental problem, not what developers want to support. The platform with the most users is what people will develop for.
If developers hate Apple then why do they buy macs?
Given the tendency for wealth and power to concentrate, is it possible to design a competitive, and efficient system where all the actors are sufficiently prosperous without the formation of any monopolies/duopolies/oligopolies? Edit: a follow-up thought. If the answer is no or "it's too hard", then is it possible have something along the same lines, is it possible for the proposed system to self-correct away from mo…
Tech has a tendency to become monopolistic. Well funded open source competitors seem like a solution as it would allow anyone to compete. Fund the development of software and not the distribution. It would realign incentives to the consumers.