Part of the reason for the push for mobile is that a big chunk of the tech industry nowadays competes with power users - if you're a power user you may not need their "solution" as you will defeat their attempt at rent-seeking by using your existing, powerful tool (the general-purpose computer) that is built to serve you rather than them. Worse, a power-user sharing their solution with others would also obviate the need for the rent-seeker's solution. A power user is absolutely not something a typical "growth & engagement" startup wants because they'll be a troublemaker, constantly poking holes into their bullshit business model.

Essentially, we had a gap where computing devices (whether mobile or desktop) became mainstream and it was just a matter of time before laymen would eventually learn how to use them to their advantage, except the VCs beat them to it and started weaponizing the devices to not just exploit laymen's inability to use them but eventually reshape the devices in a way that prevents them to be used for the user's benefit even if they somehow gained the knowledge to try.

In the old times you could pay someone a one-off fee for them to teach you fishing and then fish on your own. Nowadays, standard fishing rods are being pushed out of the market (along with the knowledge of using them), being replaced by fishing-rods-as-a-service that rely on your perpetual lack of fishing knowledge to seek rent since they now have a monopoly on fishing (and everyone's lack of fishing knowledge means a competitor making non-DRM'd fishing rods would have a very hard time starting up).

It's so true, most apps on mobile are just crappy partial tools that you already have on a PC, but worse to use and with a subscription. It always feels like technology sucks nowadays and it's just getting worse. It is no longer meant to serve us, but someone else who will abuse us for money.

I can't rely on tech or apps to do what I want, how I want it and with any privacy or reliability. It's just no longer the future that's in the cards we all dreamed about. More traps than tools. Selling a fantasy that you can talk to the air and turn a light on or ask a simple question I could type in 2s and get faster info that is more reliable, whoopdee-doo, I only had to pay for a device that spies on me 24/7 to exploit me.

They market a fake dream that makes our life look easier, cooler and more convenient, but it's definitely quite the facade once you take a step back to look at it.

> It is no longer meant to serve us, but someone else who will abuse us for money.

As predicted by Richard Stallman. People hate him because of the conclusions he draws from his principles, even though they turn out to be right every single time.

Nah. It's because people look at the conclusions he draws, that foss will benefit users, devs and the world with no downsides, and then look at the reality of the shit show of a world built on foss that we actually live in, and conclude that the organisations who benefit the most are Microsoft, google, Amazon etc. and the people who benefit the most are billionaire rent seekers and the people who work, or who want to work for them. Based on this they conclude that he's deluded. The answer to this is not more foss, license tweaks or moving off GitHub but less giving away your time and money.

You are taking so much for granted in this comment. World built on FOSS? You should be thanking Stallman on bended knee for making that possible at all. The rent-seeking situation before FOSS was infinitely worse. Today, you can spin up a cluster of servers with state of the art load balancing, databases, checkpointed filesystems, and a standardized OS without paying a cent to anyone in software licensing fees. Do you even realize the magnitude of this achievement?

Sure, billionaires benefit - so do the rest of us. A rising tide lifts all boats. Don't blame FOSS for the evils of capitalist rent-seeking; the rent-seekers of old have been toppled.

haven't read his stuff in depth but isn't stallman for copyleft not all FOSS ? and him mellowing out the copyleft stance, because not enough people are behind it therefore a need to compromise ?

because in a world you're required by law to open source and have the same copyleft license or stronger if you're using copyleft based projects that rent seeking would not be possible, but so is making money out software and the majority of the folks here and in the tech industry really don't want that.

I really wish be had that world, software would be a single community project, but less then a tenth of the people in the industry today would exist (and there will be no 'industry').

> Part of the reason for the push for mobile is that a big chunk of the tech industry nowadays competes with power users

It really doesn't. It's playing in a different league - tailoring their solutions to the mass market of those who have zero time for that power-user level of technical sophistication. It could market power-user friendly versions of its products and services, but it's way too busy pushing them for uber-inflated prices in the "enterprise" market - where power-user friendliness is just one more box to tick, hoping to make a sale.

While I think smartphones have their (limited) uses, most of them don't appeal to me for one simple reason:

Why would I read anything on a cashiers receipt/slip if I don't have to?

What about knowledge work? Employees in the tech, finance and any desk job industry aren't performing their job using an ipad or phone.

Wouldn't the tech industry have an incentive to also encourage a continuous supply of skilled labour that can use a pc effectively?

> What about knowledge work? Employees in the tech, finance and any desk job industry aren't performing their job using an ipad or phone.

You might be surprised. I have several coworkers who are doing Olympic gymnastics to get away with using iPads as primary devices. There's only a few of them right now but they are multiplying rapidly.

> Wouldn't the tech industry have an incentive to also encourage a continuous supply of skilled labour that can use a pc effectively?

Yes, but that sounds like a problem for the Zoomers and Alpha. That sounds dismissive but I'm not sure we could solve it if we wanted to. It's too far away. By the time it becomes a problem maybe everyone can work on tablets, or phones.

I maintain that the current model of "software development" is more like "software manufacturing" and will be automated away in the future to the point we wouldn't recognize it today. In 50 years software professionals will look back on how we work today and wonder how we got anything done. Not too different from the way we look back on the 1970s today. How the heck does a slide rule work anyway? Can you imagine working with punch cards?

> Wouldn't the tech industry have an incentive to also encourage a continuous supply of skilled labour that can use a pc effectively?

Given the shit-show that Windows 10 is, it doesn't appear to be the case.

The mobile first trend is being pushed in large part by millions of people from developing nations coming online who have no access to a PC or PC like device.

I think that is probably a big part, but a bigger part is 90% of people in first world countries (who have money to pay and are valuable to advertisers) have never known how to use a computer (too complicated/scary) and now they all have one in their pockets they are addicted to. And since they never used computers they aren't as immune to being scammed, ripped off and fooled with fake dreams as us who lived through it all for years.

What makes your conspiracy theory about addicted developed-nations computer users more likely than the fact that strictly more human beings live outside of developed countries than within them? Are there any priors here? Is this a question of revenue per user? Is it a matter of cultural affinity? Is there any reason at all to discount the theory of more humans in developing nations?

A typical software development shop is still going to have more options for profitability primarily aiming at first world markets. And it's not even just because the customers have more money - regulatory challenges and difficulties navigating political realities in 3rd world countries make it hard to target new apps at such markets. My previous company had exactly that challenge - we focused not only on mobile- only but older/lower spec devices hoping to break into developing markets. They never succeeded and ended up releasing exclusively in Aus and UK, where many customers would actively prefer to use desktop-based interfaces.

Many developing markets don't necessarily have devices that are much older or lower spec. Look at Malaysia, Singapore, India, China, Taiwan etc. Many people upwards of middle class in these places have good access to reasonable devices.

Rather, they have different user behaviours and different needs. Success in these markets is about responding to customer needs locally, and not presuming that conventions, ideas, and designs that make sense in rich western countries make sense in those markets.

I've seen some good arguments that GUI layouts should be completely reexamined in developing markets, because the realities of differing languages (top to bottom, or right to left reading), or differing conventions in the presentation of information (extremely dense, or extremely sparse relative to what we are used to) mean that many app GUI's are completely counter intuitive and difficult to use in these markets.

Uber for example failed to succeed in India and Singapore because they couldn't adapt to the local markets need to pay in cash. Even though credit cards are available, many customers prefer to use cash. It was such a strong preference that they would rather not use Uber than pay for their taxis with credit cards.

We never even got past the regulatory hurdles and commerical agreements needed to launch at all. Btw I would hardly consider Singapore or Taiwan developing markets - we were targeting a few east African nations and had pretty good stats on what devices were common (hint: definitely not the latest iPhones!).

Because mobile gadgetery started in the so called "first world", exposing the people there for a longer time to marketing.

That but it's also pushed by superior availability. I don't know how many times I lay on my couch and do some information work on my phone instead of taking out my laptop and doing it there faster. Often the laptop is right next to me but it feels easier to pull out my phone instead of opening my laptop. I think it's mostly due to knowing that my phone is always with me. If I want to use my laptop, there's a possibility I have to physically move to get to it. So it's less work to go for my phone directly.

This all made me realize how hooked up I am to my phone. I take it literally everywhere I go even inside my house.

The pain and frustration from using a phone is enough to beat my laziness and actually make me just walk to a computer for most anything apart from mindless scrolling/consuming. Looking for food and need to use actual websites or order from one? Just get up and save yourself the frustration.

> The problem with how accessible "computing" is these days, which really means tablet and mobile

Tablets and smartphones don't count as computing. They are tools for viewing, curation and maybe some lightweight creation, but they are appliances. They do make whatever they do more "accessible", but whatever they do is no longer computing.

> It's frustrating that everything is going/has gone mobile, because mobile sucks. ... The problem with how accessible "computing" is these days, which really means tablet and mobile, is that now everything has to be mobile first, which makes everything crappier and less configurable.

Yes, I agree that is the problem. Now both mobile and desktop computers are being made "crappier and less configurable". And computers that you cannot program, that take a long time to start, trying to work against you, etc. That is why we must make better software (especially a better web browser than the bad stuff that exists now) that isn't bad like that. That is why I do it too, and not only me, but other too hopefully will do.

Furthermore, I also hate touch screen.

> Technology is just getting worse.

Unfortunately, it is getting worse. Not only programs but also the standards, specifications, etc. They don't design computers for advanced users, but they should do. They add too many animations, DRM, telemetry, advertisement, and other stuff. The software is slow because it is badly written (but it is possible to make a faster program in C). Things that might be useful to display if you can fit on the screen are not actually displayed, instead they make it worthless display. They always put GUI, too big icons/fonts, etc. Things are not properly tested. They try to make the computer believe they know better than you and you cannot enter any good command. They try to stop you operating your computer properly. They will not make good documentation. You will have to use their badly designed software for the TV service and many other things. They design specifications badly, and insist computers to use it. HDMI is bad. USB is bad. UEFI is bad. Unicode is bad (no single character encoding will work for everything, and yet they insist that it will). HTML+CSS+JS is often bad (and they try to use it for everything, which is inappropriate). They still insist to use it, though. Things are patented and that makes it worse, too.

I think that the good design is that the end user has full control and programmability, and try not to add too many animations and other stuff like that, and ensure that it has comprehensive documentation, and don't try to believe that the user is wrong. Do not assume that the user interface is understandable, because without documentation it will not be understandable. Do not make the functions require a lot of menus to access; you can assign a key combination. I think is good design making it UNIX philosophy, is you have enough ropes to hang yourself and also a few more just in case.

One quotation from Steven J. Searle: "The sad fact of the matter is that people play politics with standards to gain commercial advantage, and the result is that end users suffer the consequences. This is the case with character encoding for computer systems, and it is even more the case with HDTV."

>I think that the good design is that the end user has full control and programmability, and try not to add too many animations and other stuff like that

Approximately 100% of the population cares much more about having a nice UI than having full programmability.

But "approximately 100%" is not the same as really 100%. That is (one reason; not only reason) why alternative programs must be written and be made available, so that not everyone has to use the same (bad) one.