New programmer, language question

[wasab]

1 minute ago, straight_stewie said:

Business process software ready for end user deployment at a serious business is almost never free.

As one example pulled from my list above, Intuits Quickbooks Point of Sale, one of the cheapest and easiest to get POS solutions, costs between $1200 and $1900 USD for a single license, and does not include the machine to run it on.

 

Would you develop seriously robust software that businesses rely on, take on all of the liability if something goes wrong and a business loses money, and then give it away for free, specifically as a tool for other people to use solely to make money? You've got to atleast try to make your arguments make sense...

I can also point out a mobile app that costs thousands for simply displaying a diamond on its screen. Let's keep on googling up outliers and exception to the rule now shouldn't we? 

[Dat Guy]

I said "good".

[wasab]

4 minutes ago, Dat Guy said:

I said "good".

You said good and paid. And I  said better and free

[straight_stewie]

34 minutes ago, wasab said:

I can also point out a mobile app that costs thousands for simply displaying a diamond on its screen. Let's keep on googling up outliers and exception to the rule now shouldn't we?  

Quickbooks is not the outlier. It's the most common and easily available POS solution for small brick and mortar businesses that aren't attached to a franchise. Even some franchised locations still use Quickbooks POS.

you're the one picking outliers buddy...

 

[wasab]

15 minutes ago, straight_stewie said:

Quickbooks is not the outlier. Like I said, it's the most common and easily available POS solution for small brick and mortar businesses that aren't attached to a franchise. Even some franchised locations still use Quickbooks POS.

you're the one picking outliers buddy...

 

You know what most brick and mortar use for their POS? How? Where you get that statistics from? At what place do most people use QuickBooks? USA? Canada? China? North Korea? Congo where most people have never even seen a computer? 

 

Most vendors provide both the hardwares, and softwares as well as support that go along with them. Customers pay all of these in a single package. They far outnumber QuickBooks model of simply charging for their softwares. You are very wrong so just give up. 

 

 

[reniat]

43 minutes ago, wasab said:

You are very wrong so just give up.

you are also completely ignoring the point i made earlier that a lot of "free" software still has paid developers behind it, which is the whole point of this thread. This thread is about the stuff you might work on as a developer, not "software marketing and business stratagies". Whether the average person pays for a desktop application has surprisingly very little to do with whether developers will be paid to write desktop applications. An increasing number of "free" products have alternate forms of revenue (e.g. ads) or rely on a consumer/enterprise split to ensure a constant revenue flow (e.g. slack). Just because you didn't pay for an application, doesn't mean someones not making some money somewhere with that software and paying developers to make it.

[wasab]

17 minutes ago, reniat said:

Maybe free products have alternate forms of revenue (e.g. ads) or rely on a consumer/enterprise split to ensure a constant revenue flow (e.g. slack).

No they don't. Most of these softwares are there to support or expand an existing business/Enterprise.

 

E.g. banks like Chase create their mobile apps to support their banking and money wiring services, not to make money off of it. 

 

These desktop applications themselves make little to no money at all, it is the business they are supporting that actually pay the developers and the development. It is in line with my claim that desktop app make no money and many are dying due to many companies moving the roles of these traditional desktop app into the cloud. 

[reniat]

9 minutes ago, wasab said:

it is the business they are supporting that actually pay the developers and the development

...so do we agree that people are still paying developers to write desktop applications?

 

I'm honestly not quite sure what you are arguing.

 

Are you saying not to learn C++/Java because desktop apps are moving to the cloud? If so:

1. There are still SO many applications that don't always need to be connected to the internet to function, and putting them in the cloud for no reason would probably not be wise.
2. You could still apply 99% of what you know for writing desktop apps in Java/C++ to write backends for cloud services....

Are you saying everyone should learn javascript?

If so, I would point out that again, backends are a thing, and not everyone needs to write front end code. That's the same exact thinking of "Everyone should learn C". Is it bad? no, but it's also not mandatory. Even in the desktop application world, there are plenty of people who don't work on the front end side of things.