But I still don't really want to pay any more for it than I already do.
I agree, but I also factor my time, patience, stress levels, and other things into the cost. (That said, I'm probably more bothered by this stuff than most, so my costs are not your costs.)
Where I disagree is that I think big production stuff can happen without ad dollars, but without data to support it, I'm just supposing.
And I also think that, on a per-dollar basis, we might even wind up paying less. Similarly suppositional, but I think we underestimate the amount of ad budgets baked into products we'd buy either way, the amount of worthless junk we pay for–either directly, or indirectly–but wouldn't, if our collective view of things was a bit more grounded and mature, and so on.
And, yeah, a trojan horse in the shape of shiny phones has certainly done wonders for that. All I can think is that perhaps desktop apps being more the domain of earlier adopters and business users, at least relative to phone sales, must be part of it.
That said, developers were doing it before iOS had an ad network, and before Android, so one could take the good-faith assumption that they were more concerned about developers making bad, annoying ads that would spoil it for everyone else (I vaguely remember Apple making some comments about that at the time), and I'm sure Google didn't want someone besides them controlling how things were presented and doing a bad job of it.
I assume that everyone is doing what they think is in their own best interest.
I'm just not sure consumers are, on balance, right in their assumptions.
I agree, but I also factor my time, patience, stress levels, and other things into the cost. (That said, I'm probably more bothered by this stuff than most, so my costs are not your costs.)
Where I disagree is that I think big production stuff can happen without ad dollars, but without data to support it, I'm just supposing.
And I also think that, on a per-dollar basis, we might even wind up paying less. Similarly suppositional, but I think we underestimate the amount of ad budgets baked into products we'd buy either way, the amount of worthless junk we pay for–either directly, or indirectly–but wouldn't, if our collective view of things was a bit more grounded and mature, and so on.
And, yeah, a trojan horse in the shape of shiny phones has certainly done wonders for that. All I can think is that perhaps desktop apps being more the domain of earlier adopters and business users, at least relative to phone sales, must be part of it.
That said, developers were doing it before iOS had an ad network, and before Android, so one could take the good-faith assumption that they were more concerned about developers making bad, annoying ads that would spoil it for everyone else (I vaguely remember Apple making some comments about that at the time), and I'm sure Google didn't want someone besides them controlling how things were presented and doing a bad job of it.
I assume that everyone is doing what they think is in their own best interest.
I'm just not sure consumers are, on balance, right in their assumptions.