path: root/computer/product_being_sold.rst

"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold (even in the FLOSS universum)"
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:date: 2012-07-16T23:30:42
:category: computer
:tags: jetpack, firefox

When reading `this Evil Brain’s post`_ I was thinking about my mom and
wife, how both of them hate ANY update of any software. And even more
about the title of this post. Price paid might not be in money, but I
guess it is still true. Developers who are not motivated primarily by
the feedback of their users (because they don't depend on them) are
motivated by other things.

And although I am a happy user of Firefox (actually, running the Nightly
... tell me about the rapid release cycle ;)) I can see how right this
post is. And how unfortunately, when MoFo doesn't depend directly on its
users, the decision process may lead to weird conclusions, weird both to
programmers (did you try to develop for Jetpack? its non-design and
sudden demise was clearly caused by complete ignorance of design, which
is too difficult to MoFo programmers and benefits only API users) as
well as users (which is what this article is about).

And of course, I know that the situation is improving (see comments on
the blog post), and no I don’t blame rapid release cycle on decline in
the Firefox’s market share (it truly started before, and it had to
decrease when the market shifted from one truly modern browser to at
least three or four of them).

.. _`this Evil Brain’s post`:
    http://evilbrainjono.net/blog?showcomments=true&permalink=1094