Re:Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?
by 013a on Sunday December 09, 2018 @10:18PM
(#18644908)
Businesses are inherently lazy. Business shrewdness and laziness are literally the same thing; businesses always take the easiest path to the greatest profit. "Lazy" just means "unwilling to expend energy".
Let's say Dow Chemical wants to start dumping chemical by-products into the Mississippi River. Thankfully, we have the EPA and strict laws which make this impossible. The only other force which would stop them from doing this is consumer outrage, which only works in some situations and even then tends to be very fleeting.
Now, let's say Slack wants to build their app in Electron. By doing so, they are collectively forcing their 8M users to burn more CPU cycles and purchase machines with larger memory footprints, all of which literally waste resources and cause pollution. Not to the same degree as the previous example, but the comparison is very valid.
> we're puking web and electron everywhere ... literally only because developers are lazy
No. This is done because developers are slow and expensive. Reusing most of your web app as a desktop app, same for every platform, saves a lot of money to companies.
> you're consistently asked to pay a monthly fee to access this functionality literally only because companies are lazy
No. This is because companies want recurring revenue, not one-time sale. It's vastly easier to get you into ("only $3.99/mo" vs "only $199.95 for lifetime of use"), and it keeps dripping every month.
There's not a bit of laziness here, only business shrewdness.