Ultrarecall - Help!!!

Posted by 22111
Aug 4, 2013 at 07:57 PM

“The hundreds of millions of consumers around the world who didn’t really need a PC but had to buy one because there were no cheap tablets or smartphones or smart TVs around yet have been subsidising the price of hardware, desktop OS and software for the heavy users like the forum members here. This era is quickly coming to an end.”

This is exactly what has happened, and what will happen. My first notebooks - I always needed notebooks, so I had to pay the price - were 8088, then 286, and at prices of which the equivalent would by portable workstations today, so I profited very much from the sudden ubiquity of notebooks some years ago.

But there are two more phenomena, except for what you say further down:

- Many “light” users grew accustomed to what notebooks have on offer, even on top even “lighter” devices, so many of them will not entirely replace them but continue to buy, but it’s predictable indeed they will buy just one new notebook for every 3 or 4 new “light” devices they will add to their hardware collection. Thus, prices will certainly rise again, but never to the state of affairs when only rich people, and those who absolutely needed notebooks, bought them.

- Danger for individual pc software development in outlining and such seems to also come from another field of the business. Some weeks ago, I read that there are endevours from corporations like SAP and such to more and more “cover” the market of tiny businesses and even “power-user” individuals. This is bad news for individual developers, all the more so since these very professional corporations that up to now didn’t deign to “serve” individual customers, have the required manpower to deliver lots of features in no time.

But let’s be honest, for us, this would be rather good news if such a thing realized: One-man-show developers did not exactly spoil us, these last years, so something new, better and more complete would certainly be well received, and speaking for myself, I would be willing to regularly spend 500, 800, 1200 dollars for software packages, like in the old times, but for real good software now, a thing I have given up to expect from those one-man shows. Don’t get me wrong: I always would prefer to give my money to Mr. Smith, rather than to Ellison/Gates/Andsuch, but then, those Mr. Smith out there didn’t deliver - that’s why this forum exists at the end of the day: Were it not for incredible, persisting shortcomings in all this one-man-show software even in features that would have been so easy to implement ten years ago (and not speaking of the real complicated stuff, now with integration of web, collaboration, synching), the phenomenon of crimping would have remained even more marginal than it is.