Comment by fermienrico | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fermienrico | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I want to live in a world where businesses are formed based on the value they deliver to the consumer directly. Not siphoning the data and selling it to third parties. Ever growing advertisement and marketing needs/greed has created a universe of stuff around us that makes me ever so vigilant of companies selling me stuff for cheap and in turn selling me advertisements.

In old days (before the internet), if I buy a PC from Apple or IBM, you get what you pay for. Besides the cable companies / newspapers / magazines bombarding ads, everything back in the day was 1:1 - you pay for something, you get value for it.

Now a days, we have large companies losing money while killing competition (Uber), large companies in bed with government, and large companies in bed with advertisers and marketing agencies.

Fuck the world. I can't wait to see Dieter Rams' documentary premier this October. From the trailers, it looks like it is addressing the very fabric of today's society than talking about industrial design. [1]

I don't want to be a product. I want to be a loyal customer.

[1] https://www.hustwit.com/rams/

IBM's XT also cost nearly $6k when it debuted (quick Google search, maybe I'm wrong). We get so much value for free now that paying directly for all of that would be a huge step back. Roughly speaking, Google makes something like $120bn a year, spread across 1bn users. Would you pay $120 for using Google a year? Realistically though you'd pay much more because there's no chance Google would charge a person in the developing/3rd world what it charges a US citizen. It's not unthinkable to get a bill of $500 per user in USA to get these services.

This is one side of the coin, the other side is that for economic activity to take place, advertising must be available. People need to be informed of services and consumption needs to be encouraged to grow economic activity. How would that happen if companies locked down their platforms altogether? Would P&G, J&J and all the other conglomerates just shrivel and die in a world where they can't access consumers?

Attributing the decreased costs of computers to the rise of advertising-based business models is quite a stretch. As far as I can tell, advances in manufacturing technology and the broadening of the market base is what made that possible.

As to Google--I'd pay $500 per year not to have it constantly barrage me with reminders to use Chrome instead of Edge (so it can steal my apparently valuable browsing data). But, 90% of everything is crap. Crap is what the market wants, whether it's pop music or USA Today or advertising-based software. Who am I to argue?

> Attributing the decreased costs of computers to the rise of advertising-based business models is quite a stretch. As far as I can tell, advances in manufacturing technology and the broadening of the market base is what made that possible.

The Internet was built on an advertising monetization model, and you could argue that the penetration of computing devices to our lives wouldn't be nearly as far reaching without the Internet. In other words, non-tech people buy iPhones to access the ad-sponsored Google, YouTube and Instagram.

> The Internet was built on an advertising monetization model

No, it wasn't; the internet was built long before that. The advertising monetisation model didn't become significant until the internet was established as a popular mass venue.

Which makes sense; the audience drew advertising, not the other way around.

Change that to "the commercial internet" then - not talking about the DARPA/Usenet/early www universe, but rather anything post 96-97 or so. It's either ecommerce or advertising ever since then.

Why not talk about usenet/early www? Just because you can sweep it away doens't mean it didn't exist

Or AOL.

People wouldn't pay that much, google would just make less profit...

I do pay Google exactly $120/year: I have my own GSuite Business account.

Think I can get them to stop datamining/tracking me?

I have abandond Google and exclusively use DuckDuckGo. If Google wasnt giving search away for free to take users to the cleaners behind their back, there would actually be healthy competition in search and you would definitely not need to pay $500/yr.

Argh. I hate to play devils advocate on this issue.

Here goes: it seems like that model doesn’t work anymore. People look for what it costs on paper. You already here people talking about Apple as if it’s some impossible luxury standard. Can you imagine if computers became £5,000 for the base model again? I can’t imagine anyone paying for email in this day and age. And I certainly can’t imagine people paying for operating systems. Windows only has market dominance because it comes pre-installed and is effectively free.

That’s the issue. If you’re competing in this market; then you’re competing with “free” from the consumers eyes.

Stopping advertising based business models would not make a $500 computer suddenly cost $5,000. Also Windows is not ‘effectively free’, it’s just you don’t usually pay for it separately.

Stopping invasive user tracking would make internet advertising less effective, sure, but it wouldn’t prevent it completely. Ad Words doesn’t fundamentally depend on user tracking to associate search terms to advertisements for example.

> Windows is not ‘effectively free’, it’s just you don’t usually pay for it separately.

https://www.howtogeek.com/163303/how-computer-manufacturers-...

The cost of a pre-installed license is cost neutral in most cases due to the crapware they add.

My overarching point is that 99% of consumers are cost-conscious. They look at the price in paper and rarely weigh anything else, especially a fuzzy notion of privacy. We are the 1% and we should be mindful of the 99%

The base model iPad costs $329, comes with free email and and an OS with free updates. And it doesn't data-mine you.

“But an android tablet costs £100! Apple tax is too high!”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com