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Comment by java-man | Hacker News Reader

I am afraid this business will fail (as a business). People, on average, prefer to have freebies at the expense of losing their privacy, than pay even a moderate amount for a service.

One can see this in how quickly various products fall when a free alternative exists. How many people buy an email client, for example?

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MS Windows is the great exception to this, where not only do they collect an inflated price for their software, they also spy on their users. So making money on the product is no guarantee that a software vendor won't also invade your privacy.

Apparently the key to success is to get corporate lock-in.

MS Windows builds on a very long history, which involves it positioning itself as the default OS on PCs (price bundled with the price of equipment), which led to a lot of software (games in particular) being written just for it. It also strongly benefited for being free for a sizable population of the world - by means of Microsoft not fighting rampant piracy of its systems.

Well the key difference is that on-paper anyway, MS claims they use telemetry to make Windows better and fix bugs, Google spies on you and your personal data so that they can sell your profile to the highest bidder who will attempt to convince you to open your wallet.

I think context matters here...

In the US, at least, debt is really high. There is a regular desire for "more". And to get "more" faster than previous generations did. All while the generations entering the workforce make less (when accounting for inflation) than previous generations did at the same age.

This can drive people to try to get more from "free" things. Things aren't "free" but instead you pay with something else you may not realize the consequence of.

It's almost a "privacy debt" instead of a financial one.

Any new thing to fight the paying with privacy instead of money model needs to start in a landscape like this.

I'm trying to prove this hypothesis wrong :) Obviously it's a big experiment.

My belief is that with the right incentive system, and right messaging & social proof, you can fix the problem. We're not there yet, but we are seeing it work on a very small scale.

I would love to see you succeed!

Thanks!

>I am afraid this business will fail (as a business). People, on average, prefer to have freebies at the expense of losing their privacy, than pay even a moderate amount for a service.

That is the current state yes, but I think that this was a manufactured type of psychology/expectation. I remember back in the day (90s 00s) when I used to install software for my family, one of my uncles was always flabbergasted that the software was free. "But why is it free?" "How do the make rent?!" I tried to explain the Hacker/OSS ethos and whatever else I could think of, but it never really sunk in for him.

I think paid software is going to make a comeback once clients realize that nobody except google (and a handful of companies) are actually benefiting from the pointless web surveillance. Hopefully that will happen when the tech industry stops giving Google a free pass for their spying and squarely puts them in the enemy camp...

This has been true for a few decades, but it may not continue to be indefinitely.

Also, it’s worth asking wondering what percentage of users you need in order to make a huge impact even if most people continue to use free stuff.

My guess is that it could be as low as 1%.

Yep, I think you hit the nail on the head. When it comes to new companies and business models, timing is super important. A great example of this was the dotcom boom where you saw a bunch of companies with (arguably) the right idea go bust, and then years later another company picked up where they left off and succeeded.

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