https://www.filfre.net/2020/04/the-shareware-scene-part-1-the-pioneers/
The history of shareware:
"The digital society which we’ve created over the last few decades has
upended many of our traditional notions about commerce. Everyday
teenagers now stress over their ratings and advertising revenues on
YouTube; gamers in “free” games pay staggering sums for the privilege of
advancing through them a little faster (wasn’t the actual playing
supposed to be the point of a game?); “clicks” and “likes” have become
commodities that are traded in the same way that soybean futures are in
the “real” world; consumers have become speculators in their own future
entertainment on crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter; a writer like
me can ask for support from readers like you to allow me to make content
that I then give away for free. (Thank you for that!) And, in the most
direct parallel to our main topic for today, even some of the biggest
corporations on the planet have learned to give away their products for
free, then ask us to pay for them later.
Some of these new modes of commerce reflect the best in us, some perhaps
the very worst. They all share in common, however, the quality of being
markedly different from the old model wherein you paid someone an
upfront amount of money and got some concrete good or service in
exchange. As those of you with elderly parents or grandparents may well
have learned, our modern digital economies have departed so far from
that model in some areas that just explaining how they work to someone
still wedded to the old ways can be a daunting task indeed. (I know that
my 86-year-old father has literally no idea what I do all day or how I
can possibly be earning money from it…) Maybe we too should ask the
question that so many of our elders are already asking themselves every
day: exactly how did we get from there to here so quickly?"
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://www.xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
http://www.glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
http://www.sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
