Re:Ask HN: Has all interesting desktop software already been...
by tonyarkles on Sunday May 22, 2016 @10:16PM
(#11751360)
All of those have piles of competition that make a bunch of money, except maybe Wireshark. In fact, I'm a paid user of the alternatives (MS Office, Photoshop, Reaper). I have used the free alternatives that you've mentioned, but relative to the commercial offerings, they are functional but clunky.
I think there's still piles of room for innovation on the desktop, both for open source and commercial software. We've reached a lot of local optima, but things can still be a whole lot better.
For an example of a Photoshop and Paint.net competitor, check out http://www.pixelmator.com/mac/. They've been around for a few years and seem to be doing quite well. BitWig is a new competitor in the DAW space: http://www.bitwig.com/en/bitwig-studio.html.
Re:Ask HN: Has all interesting desktop software already been...
by wprapido on Monday May 23, 2016 @12:02AM
(#11751783)
sketch (http://www.sketchapp.com) is a good illustrator competitor, as well
It's also hard to make money when there's so much free software available, some of which is quite good. For example, it would take a huge amount of effort to improve on the functionality of Libre Office, Paint.net, Audacity, Wireshark, etc. (just to name a few of the free programs I use) but since people can get these for free, a competing product would have to be a whole lot better to convince people to pay for it.