Th3 Core

In a recent(ish) video interview of Warren Buffett he mentioned how he preferred to read rather than watch or listen because he could scan and process the information so much faster by reading.

Text is also far easier to edit than videos are.

I loathe trying to make video, but in some ways that is what much of the web is becoming anyhow. Google, Apple, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon funding original vids … longtail vid niche sites like Crunchyroll … big media consolidation with Disney buying Fox, Comcast buying Sky, AT&T buying Time Warner.

GDP growth by any means  necessary. Growth is growth. Storms, disease, poor coding & opioids = the 4 horseman carrying the BoJack economy

I think everyone in media does that...use whatever numbers make them look the best at first glance.

It is not an accident that Google Analytics defaulted to last click distribution (brand search late in funnel after purchase decision has already been made).

I think Facebook gave themselves a 28-day credit window for app installs, even though almost anything driven directly by the ad would typical happen in under a day.

About the only exception to the above sort of self-grading I can think of is when some numedia wants CPMs about 30x to 50x normal & then they talk about how influential their readers are (while maybe not mentioning too much how many of those readers use ad blockers, etc.).

A friend also recommended DP in the past & I thought it was a great deal as well.

Before DepositPhotos there was one called something like DollarPhotoClub.com, but at some point that went away and the credits got converted into expiring credits at Adobe Stock.

I was looking at the list, seems like everyone is opting for Chromium over Gecko. I wonder why?  A few go with Webkit.

Apple users are more likely to use whatever Apple sets as the default vs switching web browsers to a rival brand, so even if you beat Apple building from Apple's code base (in terms of quality) you probably still are not going to get much share. Plus what if Apple shifts their code base dramatically in a way that only works on their hardware? They did do away with the Safari for Windows browser years ago.

Chrome has the most marketshare on desktop (bundling with Adobe Flash security updates, heavily marketed across Google properties, etc.) & on mobile (via Android). So if you use Chromium as your base you are getting something that should both work cross-platform & be something many web developers have optimized their code against.

Opera also has a VPN built in, which you can turn on or off with a toggle.
https://www.opera.com/

It was bought out by some Chinese investors a few years ago
https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/18/opera-browser-sold-to-a-chinese-consortium-for-600-million/
had a news app added to the company to show faster growth
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/08/opera_v49_overhaul/
& then was flipped back public on the Nasdaq for about double the buyout valuation
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/27/browser-maker-opera-successfully-begins-trading-on-nasdaq/

I think a lot of the company's growth (& thus valuation) comes from the news app, but I am highly suspect that will be a sustainable stand alone thing over time.

Part of what did in the Yahoo! home page was the Facebook or Twitter news feeds, but another big thing that continues to hurt them is how many leading browsers recommend stories on new tabs. Microsoft does this, so does Mozilla, the Chrome version on mobile is a massive traffic driver & Apple bought Texture as part of a move to eventually offer a paid news subscription service where they'll do some sort of rev share with publishers for the top end of the market.

I am not sure how Opera will continue to grow the usage of their news app against the deep pocketed online surveillance ad network companies which own the operating system layer or such.

Some of the original team behind Opera launched another browser
https://vivaldi.com/

Pretty soon, what you find is that if you aren't careful, at an average of $10/mo for subscriptions that seem completely worth it for "just", you now have a big fixed cost that is silently draining your coffers through autopay.

Buying too many domain names and accumulating dozens of hosting accounts can also end up being a big drain. I prune domains every few years. I think about every 2 or 3 years I keep deleting about half of whatever is left.

For music or books or movies I usually prefer to buy a MP3, book, ebook that is owned, or a DVD that can then be converted to a local styled Netflix offering on Plex for the house.

I subscribe to the WSJ & a few other niche media sites like Real Vision.

One way to save decently on a Lastpass or RoboForm styled subscription is to wait until they have a 40% off black Friday sale or such & then do the 5-year extension which is 40% off for buying 5 years. Get 40% off of the already 40% off and you are paying 36% of the typical annual cost.

And for things like stock photos I either go for something with non-expiring one-off credits, or if I wanted to work on revamping a large project for a client or something like that maybe I'd do a big subscription for a month or two & then cancel it when the project was over or such.

Quote from: aaron on September 15, 2018, 05:24:19 PM

And increasingly people do not own what they purchase

No, but didn't you hear, that is MUCH better for the consumer. They don't want to own things. They want to pay subscriptions indefinitely
https://www.zuora.com/vision/subscription-economy/

The subscription model does better align incentives (product creator keeps making a better product that keeps delivering more value) and customers who value it most can pay higher rates for more features while those who do not value it as much don't pay.

The big issue from the consumer perspective is lock-in. And then the big issue from the company perspective is dealing with the cost of repeated churn & people who use free trials or such repeatedly across different computing devices, web browsers, emails, VPNs, etc etc etc

I had been hesitant to buy an Office 365 license wanting to forgo an ongoing subscription price for software I downloaded, but they added a feature I wanted which was only available to Office Insiders, which is only accessible to those with an active Office 365 subscription. That feature was worth far more than the ongoing recurring licensing fee.

Some other companies which have really juiced revenues by going recurring on account access fees like Adobe I have been more hesitant to move across on & I bought the latest version of the Creative Suite the day their model shift was announced so I had the newest version of the old stuff which will last as long as possible.

Sometimes with software there is a bit of a water cycle as companies use small businesses to dogfood their software & build awareness later move upmarket to enterprise the cost spiral eventually leads to a new market entry point for a new provider catering to small businesses. But in some cases if there is a subscription price set low enough and/or a free tier and/or academic exemptions to the price spiral perhaps once dominant software can remain dominant far longer.

Sites like Canva or services like Sketchup or Google Docs are plenty popular, but nothing has really displaced Adobe or Autodesk or Microsoft Office.

I can't imagine how complex the Excel codebase is or how hard a deep rewrite would be without breaking the software on existing computers all around the world.

Some of the smaller software companies have simply went away or were sold for a song while the dominant players have grown more dominant (based at least upon what the stock market is saying with Adobe being worth over $100 billion, Microsoft not too far from $1 trillion & Autodesk more than tripling over the past 3 years).

As the customer relationships become annuities rather than discrete sales, it gives the leaders increased margins to spend more money on brand awareness and drive up ad rates in the industry, which blocks out most other competing commercial offerings unless they are more specialized to a specific niche market.

A smaller animation software maker like Smith Micro Software trades at about $2 a share, down from $63 in 2010. They definitely should do the subscription model with their animation software seeing how well it worked for Adobe.

Muvizu went away and got purchased by some company out of China for a song. Customer support & setting up a license may require learning a bit of Chinese & opening up a QQ account or such.