What happened to building great software, providing great service and letting the rest flow from there? Monetization strategy; what is that, really? How is that ever going to lead anywhere that matters? Not that I don't have the same issues, I too am trying hard to find a way to survive in this mess of a world; but I'm convinced it all starts with doing the right thing, which rules out advertisement bullshit for me.
The large quantity of very profitable and very poorly done software is a counter to your last sentiment.
Here's the thing: most consumers don't know enough about what "great software" means to care much about it. They just want software that works to solve a problem they have. They don't care if it never crashes or is written in language X or written by a process with rigorous QA and design, etc.
I'm not arguing that it can't be done, I too have seen plenty of examples. I'm saying that it's not leading anywhere, individually or collectively; which is why I suggest focusing on substance instead and seeing where that leads us. I believe the problem is that the general public have no clue about what's possible, and we're not doing a very good job at showing them by producing more of the same crap.
My point is that the general public doesn't care what's possible, and it doesn't matter how good we are at showing them. It isn't that they're incapable of understanding, just that they (we) have a finite budget for attention and learning about things and the "what's possible" in software is generally much lower in priority for that.
Nothing happened. Build it and they will come (tm) never flowed.
Sympathies for the struggle, but I'm not sure why you're convinced "survival" "starts with doing the right thing", discarding "monetization strategy" and cursing "advertising bullshit". That's not the path to "somewhere that matters", it's just the path to a failed business venture.
Sympathy doesn't help, what we need to get out of here is action. Most people agree we're going nowhere fast, but precious few are willing to step out of line and change anything to break the loop. I don't know the answers, but any option is better than what we have now.
I'll tell you what happened: The industry matured. In the 80s, 90s, hell even the mid 2000s, if you had a great product you could likely get business because simply, you had a great product! Tons of industries were being transformed, disrupted, and shaped by new firms all the time. Famously, Adobe was profitable within its first year of operation thanks to a nice deal with Apple to use postscript (bit of history here: https://www.prepressure.com/postscript/basics/history and here http://appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/14/adobe_apple_war_on... )
Its unlikely the then young Adobe would have needed to do much if at all any marketing to get companies behind PostScript, because it was ahead of any other solution of its time. Many people welcomed it with open arms, and it became the de-facto standard quickly at the time.
Adobe just built a superior product. And then they all showed up to get some.
You can say the same of Netscape in the 90s before Internet Explorer, you could say the same of MySpace in the early 200s as the superior social network to what came before it. (Of course, this is before FaceBook, which through targeted marketing at first to college kids, proved to usher in a different era, on many fronts, in 2006). There are other numerous examples.
Fast forward to post Web 2.0 hay-fever of the mid 2000s into the Gold Rush stage of the App Economy, by 2010, there was a clear shift. Apple & Google consolidated on mobile. The Desktop, a traditional stalwart of Microsoft, began its small but inevitable decline of mindshare (and eventually, real dollars) in the minds of consumers and businesses alike. Web apps made the desktop OS less relevant (but not irrelevant, mind you). The field became crowded. Quality wasn't the only measure of success anymore. The economy of software shifted, in large part due to the internets inherent reliance on gaining users first for services (like FaceBook, which at one point was being hailed as the 'the gaming future' https://www.forbes.com/2010/02/27/videogames-farmville-zynga..., see these other anecdotes as well: http://www.adweek.com/digital/future-social-gaming-facebook/, https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/02/big-names-tiny-games-... notice that FaceBook rarely charged a dime for any of its endeavors. The same happened in email, and other services)
What become clear as these platforms began to take assertive positions in the market place is that it no longer became about just quality. The quality, or I should say the minimum viable quality, became easy to achieve. Xcode, through quite a few iterations, made it easy to go with default values that make most apps look and feel relatively native. You didn't have to be the best coder to have a slick working app and publish to the app store. The 'quality' of the product increased its minimum bar substantially. iOS 7, for all it garnered, enforced a design paradigm that adapted easily to most apps by default. Google with Android is achieving this, albeit more slowly, with Material as well.
Not mention toolkits published by Unity, FaceBook has their own frameworks as well for publishing things to their platform (not so much games anymore, as much as now becoming a strong aggregator of media), and much more. This isn't to say anyone can code and put out a great app, there is still some skill required. It is to say that it takes much less to build that quality product.
So today, in 2017, it is unfair and quite naive, I think, in this world we have, to broadly state, 'build it and they will come' makes any sense. Because you can build the next great thing. And nobody will come. You can build something that is so compelling that anyone aware of its existence would be a fool not to adopt it, and it can still fail. Why? because you are no longer competing on 'quality' as much as exposure, marketing, and mindshare. Is quality a component? You bet. I am not arguing for a lack or disregard for quality. Its very important. Now, however, you are competing for the funnel. The eyes of those you seek to reach. We find ourselves in the same situation car companies did years ago. Where generally speaking, all cars built today, are about as reliable as each other, broadly speaking. Instead, they duke it out on the fringes (performance cars, electric cars, until perhaps recently, hybrid cars) or for mindshare and price.
Price. You see, price as a side of effect of this, for software, has effectively been driven to zero for most markets, broadly speaking. Advertising is the only quick way most companies, I believe, have found any way to monetize their product at all. If you consider the age we are in, its remarkable people want to build software that relies on any sales at all. The rise of subscription software is no accident. Even Enterprise software has been upended by the free or freemium models. One of the larger HVAC businesses in my area of living, for example, still uses their @gmail.com for email because thats what they started with 10 years ago (roughly, i think thats about how long they been around). Why pay for email when you don't have to? SquareSpace, Wix, Blogger, Wordpress, and the like, have also decimated the once flourishing cottage industry of catering to small and medium business owners to get a web presence.
That, in 2017, is the state of the markets of software. Especially consumer software. Now is the time of infinite quality (from the very best to minimally viable, but viable enough to be considered quality @ that specified 'bracket' or 'demeanor'). Quality, itself, is no longer the only reason people use a product.
The way you're framing it sounds like we don't have any alternatives to continuing down this road; from my perspective; this is the future we are creating by not considering options. We didn't come up with these backward ideas, bullshit wears suits. We're the ones we've been waiting for; it's up to us to change this into something better, and that starts with considering options.
What options? The idea of just 'selling great software' is old as hat. The new in-app purchases and subscription models, in terms of how software is sold and maintained, is certainly much newer.
So called 'donation' or 'tip jar' type is pretty old too.
Shareware was the original free trial. Then we just started calling it a free trial!
Advertising is old as hat, been funding not just software, but many things, for a long time.
I'm having a hard time thinking of the different ways you can actually sell your software to someone, and in an app store dominated economy, where its idea of how software is paid for really has a cascading (and I would argue detrimental) affect on how all software is sold/distributed/licensed/modeled.
Am I missing something? I'm all for high ideas. I just don't see anything short of revolting against platforms that even come close to difference.
I'm all about options. In fact, i'd love to hear some.
I don't have all the answers, that's not required for raising questions. What we're doing right now is leading us down the drain fast. Advertising is about creating problems, period; and if it's one thing we don't need right now, it's more problems. Further, the proven driver for true motivation and satisfaction is mastery; doing something well; we all know this deep inside, but the contrast is too much to deal with; still, that's exactly where we need to go.
A Procrustean-Bed situation right here; it can be hard to accept some (looming?) reality particularly when the consequences for your craft and pocket are very unpalatable.
Well, we've been told that software is eating the world. We forgot that Silicon Valley and all it represents still draw their breath from the world that's getting eaten up. :)
No one ever promised it was going to be easy, convenience is one of the drugs we've been hooked on. The truth is that we're not victims to circumstances; once we snap out of it, we can do whatever we feel like; create exactly the kind of life and world we want. So lack of power isn't really the problem, the problem is fear; fear of challenging the status quo, of stepping out of line, of taking risks; fear of living.
Yeah, that's easy for you to say. Are you going to pay to put my kids through college so I can make you happy by signing up for your experiment? I didn't think so
