[WarmWash]

Nobody wants to pay for anything, so the services that figured out how to profit from people not paying will win.

There was this idea born in the late '90's/early 00's that everything digital should be free. The internet was dominated by teenagers with no job and no credit card, so it made sense.

But the result of that has been a whole generation with an allergy to compensation, and the inability for anyone to compete with "free" services, even if everyone hates that service.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Prior to eternal September, the internet was dominated by college students and staff. Everything was free by virtue of there being no secure payment mechanism. That spirit continued as it opened to the broader public.

[rglullis]

> Everything was free by virtue of there being no secure payment mechanism.

That and the fact Universities provided free, fast and unmetered internet access. I doubt they would be running anything if they had to pay $1/hour like regular people had to in their dial-up days.

[psychoslave]

Most people will gladly throw large pile of money for everything that they feel convinced serve them well, provided they are not living by some ridiculously low wage that turn them into monthly paycheck serfs.

When large portion of moneyless teenagers grown up into indebted to death adults, there is no wonder they stick to lure at free services rather than unaffordable services.

[mancerayder]

That's a really curious perspective. There are a few different angles of attack here, but let's start with this: it WAS free because people were making free content. Before the Internet we were hosting free BBSes (look those up), we then hosted websites which we made ourselves when the Internet was commercialized, and we paid for services like games where it made sense. You'd buy software you'd own forever (like Photoshop), you'd buy music you owned (like CDs), and there weren't 30 subscriptions randomly renewing on your credit card.

Google won because it was a single text box. Yahoo lost because it full of ads and pretended to be a phone book. Linux won in the server world because it was free and superior, Windows lost because it's shite and expensive.

I could go on, but before I do that I'd have to be convinced I'm not replying to a 27 year-old who just graduated business school.

[account42]

The thing is, even today much content on the internet is still made for free without anything being paid to the author - we just have third-parties who have inserted themselves to profit from it. That's mostly a failure of society to provide the needed infrastructure as a public good.

[rglullis]

BBS were only amateur efforts. Linux would not go anywhere if it was not for IBM famously investing 1 billion in 2000.

You can get some development and innovations built purely on "free", but without actual professionals who can make a living by developing these systems, they never take off to reach the masses. The best example is social media and the Fediverse.

[saltcured]

I adopted Linux in college in 1993 and, like many peers, brought it to my R&D job and observed this wave of expansion through the mid to late 90s. Linux was already "going somewhere" in 2000 for IBM to even notice it. Lots of federal grant money was directly or indirectly improving Linux due to FOSS folks like me.

It was getting so much commercial and academic engagement that we had the idioms (cliches?) of the "LAMP stack" for basic web servers and "Beowulf clusters" for high performance computing. Even SGI was already revealing a Linux plan, before 2000, when they still seemed like a fixture of the HPC industry rather than an also ran.

[rglullis]

I apologize for the hyperbole, but you are arguing my point: if something took "lots of federal grant money" to become usable in universities and amount to anything more than a research project, then we are no longer about something "free", are we?

[jemmyw]

From that point of view nothing that requires human input is free. Which is true in a sense, people are using free to mean free to use, not free to improve.

[rglullis]

> nothing that requires human input is free.

TANSTAAFL does not need a qualifier to apply. "Nothing is really free, so whatever you got 'for free' from a community member or some non-commercial effort was bound to have limited reach" is more like the point I'm trying to make.

[admash]

That’s disingenous. Microsoft themselves considered Linux a serious threat as early as 1998, as described in their own confidential memoranda. (AKA the Halloween Documents released by ESR.)

[rglullis]

You are right, I abused the hyperbole. The IBM investment was not the first thing that propelled Linux to the mainstream. I remember that in 1999 my university was already installing Red Hat with Gnome 1.0 on the workstations for the computer lab, which of course already implies that Red Hat already existed as a mature company trying to make money from support contracts.

But even if the data point is not good to support the argument, I don't think one could argue that Linux succeeded by "being free". If Linux was a "serious threat" in 1998, it was because there already companies looking into it and willing to make back it up financially to help its development.

[esseph]

The Software Creations BBS was not an amateur effort. (Just an example)

And prior to whatever IBM did in 2000, I already had a job deploying Linux and BSD systems in production at a corporate job.

[rglullis]

> The Software Creations BBS was not an amateur effort

Yeah, and it was a BBS ran and backed by a software development company that used it as a channel to promote and sell their software. IOW, they were not offering the infrastructure "for free".

> I already had a job deploying Linux and BSD systems in production at a corporate job

Which means that there was someone paying your employer to support it. Again, not doing it "for free".

I think you and the others responding to me are just trying to disprove the specifics of my comment but entirely missing the meat of the argument: I am far from being "a 27 year-old who just graduated business school", but I agree with GP said: people will not pay for digital services unless they absolutely have to, so companies that try to make a living by offering a quality service in exchange for payment will invariably lose to someone that offers their product "for free" but exploits their customers elsewhere.

[KellyCriterion]

>>Google won because it was a single text box.

I remember a colleague around 1998, he said: "how will they ever make money? Its just an empty website?"

LOL

[rglullis]

You are arguing GP's (WarmWash) point and not even realizing it.

[Zambyte]

Counter point: https://kagi.com/stats

About 70k people are paying at least $5 a month. I've been using the $25 a month plan for nearly 3 years now. I imagine Kagi is doing alright.

[anon7000]

Google could loose 70k active users and it wouldn’t even register as a blip. They have like 50,000-60,000 TIMES as many active users.

I’m one of those 70k people and support Kagi, and I also strongly believe in companies succeeding and sustaining themselves on a small scale like this. I think our economy would be healthier if it was made of many, many small companies, not a few massive ones.

But we can’t argue Kagi is anything more than a super niche product, for now. :(

[saltyoldman]

Typically the reason for there being so few smaller companies is paradoxically that small companies exist to be gobbled up by the big ones.

[Zambyte]

A company can be successful without dominating the world.

[virgil_disgr4ce]

> Nobody wants to pay for anything

Congratulations, this might be the single most trivially-disprovable statement I've ever seen on this site

[hombre_fatal]

Try to respond with substance here on HN. Their point can’t be summarized by what you quoted, yet you responded to a quote.