Quote Originally Posted by Frets View Post
Actually as I understand it you either keep paying or you are screwed.

It's a weird way to tackle piracy. The thinking is that people will be more inclined to buy in if it costs them less dropping 20 on a debit card monthly makes owning (renting) the software much more attainable for those who don't have big bucks or established credit.
I'm not sure if it'll help tackle piracy at all. If you don't pay the fee, obviously you lose access to any software updates, data you stored on their servers... but I'm sure a patch will be out almost immediately to keep the software from crippling itself if it can't phone home.

I'd submit that what Adobe -- and lots of other software companies (ahem, EA?) -- would really like to do, and probably the whole reason that Google is busy laying residential fiber, is to have all the software or even the whole OS Running on their own servers, and the client application just show a remote desktop. That'll be "Cloud 2.0", and it'll be sold as a way to access all your software from any screen... the catch is you won't actually own any software or even your own files anymore, and they can shut you off at any time, for any reason.

Quote Originally Posted by Frets View Post
A lot of what the web experience ins't what it used to be simply because the public is more concerned with "being seen" online then anything else. God forbid someone has a train of thought that requires more then a tweet allows for.

As far as smart phones go... I still don't own one.
Yeah, it everyone honking, flapping and tweeting at the same time, "listen to me, I'm on the radio!" Kind of like reality TV, it's cheaper to let everyone be the center of their own narcissistic little narrative than to develop creative informational content. Cheap, uncreative third world developers, human laziness, the explosion of templates and frameworks (and even node.js and NoSQL) all add to this. And it's a feedback loop that smart phones have radically accelerated, where people don't even want to hear anyone's voice but their own anymore, don't have the patience for a narrative that informs or leads them through an experience. There was another view of the web, originally, that a website could be kind of like a multiple-ending novel. A lot of really bad websites came out of this, but there were some great ones, and more importantly there was diversity. I remember the shift around 2001 where people stopped wanting their website to look different from everyone else's, and started wanting everything to "look like Google". Bands, film releases, even breakfast cereals (http://frootloops.com ...!) could be a story that the consumer was woven into. Bands with sales under 10,000 albums were building way cooler, better sites than, e.g. http://madonna.com ...but the smart phone destroyed all of that and undermined the artisan class (us) who made specialized in building those things. And most companies decided not to go for the big spend of building a mobile site and a separate desktop experience. The added value is difficult to measure on a balance sheet. And not searchable? Oh no!