Right, but email is ubiquitous now, and people still buy paper greeting cards to send to people. Not because they don't use email -- most greeting cards buyers do use email. But they get something out of a paper greeting card that they cannot get out of email. (Some of them get it out of an electronic greeting card, some not so much.)
I have six online competitors to my desktop application that I know about. They're made by wonderful people. Some of them are even free.
Many of them show ads for my product and they're, empirically, the best places for me to put ads.
(Google will helpfully let you see what websites are making you money. Other AdWords users should really get to be friends with the Placement Report. Fascinating stuff there. Tangent over.)
Given the choice, today, between a no-install, free online application which is staring them in the face and clicking to another website, downloading something, installing it, running it, playing around, clicking purchase, reaching for the credit card, typing in their details, and inputing a license key, a few hundred people have said "Oh, easy -- I want the downloaded one."
Why is that? There are a couple of reasons (which you would be intensely bored about because you've presumably never had to create bingo cards for 25 people), but it boils down to "The experience of using the desktop application sucks a lot less than the experience of using the web application, for at least some users". They get something out of the desktop version that they couldn't get from the web version, and voted with their wallet.
That's just the view from my little, teeny wedge of the economy. Are all similar wedges going to inexorably vanish? Probably, if you come at it from the assumption that everyone will eventually come to work like you. To misquote another Englishman: "There are more needs in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are answerable by the types of products you yourself buy."
Greeting card companies are still so profitable because generally inkjets can't match their quality. It's not going to be email or the web that kills their current business model, it'll be higher-res printers.
I bet a fair share of desktop software persists soley because of how awkward it is to print from the browser. (The reason no one realizes that the URL, page number, and timestamp can be removed is entirely because of the unnecessary complexity of the UI.)
If Mozilla, Google, or Apple made their printing interface dramatically better (which would be synonymous with making it dramatically simpler) they might be able to win a surprising number of IE users. The correlation between technical proficiency and a penchant for hardcopies seems roughly inversely proportional. While, for instance, my parents don't see much additional value in using Chrome over IE for browsing, they'd probably use it exclusively if it made printing significantly more comfortable.
I have six online competitors to my desktop application that I know about. They're made by wonderful people. Some of them are even free.
Many of them show ads for my product and they're, empirically, the best places for me to put ads.
(Google will helpfully let you see what websites are making you money. Other AdWords users should really get to be friends with the Placement Report. Fascinating stuff there. Tangent over.)
Given the choice, today, between a no-install, free online application which is staring them in the face and clicking to another website, downloading something, installing it, running it, playing around, clicking purchase, reaching for the credit card, typing in their details, and inputing a license key, a few hundred people have said "Oh, easy -- I want the downloaded one."
Why is that? There are a couple of reasons (which you would be intensely bored about because you've presumably never had to create bingo cards for 25 people), but it boils down to "The experience of using the desktop application sucks a lot less than the experience of using the web application, for at least some users". They get something out of the desktop version that they couldn't get from the web version, and voted with their wallet.
That's just the view from my little, teeny wedge of the economy. Are all similar wedges going to inexorably vanish? Probably, if you come at it from the assumption that everyone will eventually come to work like you. To misquote another Englishman: "There are more needs in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are answerable by the types of products you yourself buy."