On Monday, 17 September 2018 at 22:27:41 UTC, Neia Neutuladh
wrote:
On Monday, 17 September 2018 at 15:47:14 UTC, Joakim wrote:
Not sure why that matters if you agree with Kay that HTML is
an abortion? :) I actually think it's great that mobile is
killing off the web, as the Comscore usage stats I linked
earlier show.
HTML is a somewhat open standard. I'm more happy with HTML and
Javascript, as ugly as they are and as dominated by Google and
Microsoft as they are, than having to target private companies'
frameworks.
So you'd rather target an incredibly badly designed open standard
than a mostly open source "private company's" framework that's
certainly not great, but much better? It's no contest for me,
give me the latter any day. And then of course, there's always
cross-platform OSS toolkits like Flutter or DlangUI.
On Monday, 17 September 2018 at 23:42:03 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
On Monday, 17 September 2018 at 15:47:14 UTC, Joakim wrote:
On Sunday, 16 September 2018 at 15:41:41 UTC, tide wrote:
On Sunday, 16 September 2018 at 15:11:42 UTC, Joakim wrote:
I say that almost 30% drop in PC sales over the last 7
Might be, but so is trying to convince everyone your
predictions are correct so they will focus their work on the
issues important to you.
Not at all, because if my predictions are correct, this
language will disappear along with the PC platform it's built
on. And I've never suggested anybody work on anything
"important to [me]," my original post even stated that D may
never do well on mobile.
You are making your arguments to fit your desires.
I can't make head nor tails of this claim, you have a talent for
vague non sequiturs. My arguments are based on data, the
overwhelming sales numbers I linked. I have no idea what desires
you think are involved, I suspect you don't either. :)
Plateaus almost never happen, it's not the natural order of
things.
OK the market stabilises.
I don't see how you changing the word you used changes
anything about the underlying phenomenon: that doesn't happen.
You're seriously suggesting that markets never stabilise, say
oil prices stay steady for a few years or some such?
Prices flit all over the place, that's not what we're talking
about. Oil _production_ has been remarkably consistent and
growing for many, many decades:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crude_NGPL_IEAtotal_1960-2008.svg
The only hiccup was in the early '80s because of extraordinary
measures taken by governments, like price controls and cartel
orders, which was still only a 15% drop.
If oil production ever drops 30% because some workable substitute
comes along, as has happened to PCs now, yes, there is no chance
of stabilization. It will be a steady decline from there, as
these trends have a kind of momentum.
Most households have more devices than ever before, and
hardware is only getting cheaper. The idea that people will
have to choose just one device is plainly wrong.
You need to get out in the world a bit more. The majority of
smartphones these days are bought in emerging markets where
_nobody in their home has ever owned a PC or used the
internet_. I've talked to these working stiffs in developing
markets, you clearly haven't.
And what happens when the emerging markets mature? Do they
still just cling on to one smart phone in the house? Or are
they yearning for more technology?
They buy more mobile devices, the PC will be long since dead and
gone.
I find it strange that you think the PC won't also be rolled
up by mobile like this.
Can you put a 3GB hard drive in your phone?
Why would I ever want to do this when I noted my phone has 128
GBs of space? ;) If you mean 3 _TB_, yes, I simply attach my
slim 1 TB external drive and back up whatever I want over USB
3.0.
So you're not averse to having some external hardware sat on
your desk. Hmmm.
My original post links to examples of using your smartphone
connected to a keyboard and monitor or a laptop shell, so I'm not
sure where you ever got the idea I was against "external
hardware."
Or a high end graphics card?
Smartphones come with very powerful graphics cards these days,
plenty powerful enough to drive lots of graphic loads.
Not if you're into high end gaming.
The vast majority of PCs don't have cards capable of that either.
For the few who want it, there will be specialized solutions,
whether consoles or whatever.
Or a soundcard with balanced outputs?
Some phones come with high-end DACs and the like, or you could
always attach something externally if you really needed to.
There's no such thing as professional audio breakout box for
android AFAIK. Up until a few years ago the problem was Android
couldn't do low latency audio, I'm not sure if the situation
has changed.
If and when that becomes a market that actually matters, somebody
will cater to it, just as google optimized the Android video
stack for VR a couple years ago:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/android-7-0-nougat-review-do-more-on-your-gigantic-smartphone/11/#h2
http://authorearnings.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Slide29.jpg
And how does that contradict anything I said?
It contradicts your statement...
"print is pretty much dead"
If you can make the argument that print is dead and ebooks
booming when print still outsells ebooks in unit sales 2 to 1,
and even more than that if you look at revenue then you need to
see a shrink. :)
Or I actually understand market dynamics, :) which it's now
become clear that you don't. This print decline is never going to
stop.
ebooks have peaked while print keeps growing, whereas the
article I linked and this guy's data show ebooks growing and
print continuing to decline.
You didnt read the article carefully enough. The growth is in
"adult fiction", the market as a whole has fallen.
It's funny how you keep making mistakes and then act as though I
made them. The article notes that the indie ebook market has
likely "taken off," more than making up for the slight drop in
ebook sales from publishers.
Adult fiction is examined because it's a particularly relevant
market. Since you like that Author Earnings site so much and link
to more graphs from his report, you should've taken a moment to
read what he actually writes. He notes in his latest report:
"a huge chunk of those print dollars are actually going to
textbooks and other academic/professional print titles
(strangely, the DSM-5 Psychiatric Manual of Mental Disorders was
a particularly high 2017 seller). Textbooks, which are generally
priced in the $60-$200 range, skew the dollar total significantly
toward print. As do children’s books (including Board Books),
another huge category of book sales where almost all purchases
are in print.
When we leave out textbooks and children’s titles, and look only
at adult fiction & trade nonfiction, the picture changes
somewhat..."
http://authorearnings.com/report/january-2018-report-us-online-book-sales-q2-q4-2017/
So the reason to look at the 4 to 1 ratio of ebook sales to print
of adult fiction online is because it's a bellwether, as one of
the largest market segments that's actually driven by consumers.
Textbooks and giant medical manuals are the last to switch to any
new tech, as they're selected or purchased by large, hidebound
institutions that always adopt new tech last or are more about
signaling, ie students and doctors showing off that "I be
learning" or "I can look up stuff" with those fat print books
that they almost never crack open. Children's print books sell
because many parents are wary of exposing their kids to too much
screen time.
But since adult readers are showing so overwhelmingly that they
don't care for print, even those last educational/medical
holdouts will soon switch en masse and the print collapse begins.
I never said ebook sales had passed print yet, only linked to
that article saying that it's hard to measure now but it's
likely print is still declining, and that print is effectively
dead, as it's only going to keep declining into irrelevance.
So it's hard to measure but it's definitely going to die. LOL.
I don't know what you find contradictory about that. A dying
market doesn't want to signal that it's going away: that's why
the newspaper ad revenue chart I linked before ends in 2014.
Their newspaper trade group stopped publishing the data then,
clearly because the ongoing collapse only made them look more and
more irrelevant.
Similarly, we're not getting all the data now because it doesn't
suit Amazon's or indie authors' interests to tip their hands.
When they've finally killed off print, they'll start trumpeting
their numbers and how they did it.
and yes that's with indie published books included.
Another interesting thing from that report was the average
price of indie ebooks was $2.95
http://authorearnings.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Slide26.jpg
So even selling ebooks for peanuts cant catch them up.
They aren't selling them for "peanuts," they've simply
stripped out a bunch of legacy costs like paper, editors,
publishers, and the like. The reason authors still prefer
indie ebooks is they get more money per book even at that
lower price, as the rest of the supply chain and distribution
had squeezed them down to only 5-15% of the much higher print
price.
How much profit the author makes is irrelevant. The point is
you can buy an ebook for an average of $2.95 or a print book
for (uninformed guess) $8. And yet more people still choose the
print book.
Ah, now we get to the crux of the matter: you don't know much
economics. The fact that the indie ebook author makes a lot more
profit is one of the most important factors in this market, and
is one of the main reasons why the indie ebook market is
currently booming.
As for prices bearing on buyers, you should actually _look_ at
your data linked above. It notes that prices of indie and Amazon
print books are 2-3X those of ebooks, which is why the ebooks
sell 10-60X as many units!
You try to extrapolate that same price ratio to publishers'
ebooks, but the article I linked explicitly noted that publishers
will often stupidly charge more for their ebooks than the print
version, and your whole argument was invalidated by the note
above about textbook/manual prices skewing print prices upwards.
And this is what even now you dont understand. People like real
books, they like the feel of it the immediacy, the intimacy.
They like their kindles too.
Heh, the go-to last-resort argument of fans of a dying tech:
people just love "the look" of VHS more!
It's not one or the other. I cant believe you dont understand
that.
Yes, yes, we all know how many people are still rocking VHS
tapes, iPods, point-and-shoot cameras, etc., all the tech I've
pointed out has basically died off.
Print is as dead as VHS, not in sales yet, but in terms of having
a future. Everybody knows this, even you.
Anyway, I'll stop lecturing you on basic economics and business,
and bow out from responding to these often silly arguments from
you from here on.
