Evidence the old ways are failing

[balupton]

• Realmac: http://www.realmacsoftware.com/blog/sustainability-and-the-mac-app-store

• Tapity: http://tapity.com/yep-paid-apps-are-dead/

• Marco Arment: http://www.marco.org/2013/09/28/underscore-price-dynamics

• David Barndard: http://davidbarnard.com/post/58970496119/the-sparrow-problem

• The year we broke the internet: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/news/we-broke-the-internet

  Everyone wants everything for free now—news, music, movies, etc.—which means the companies don’t have any money to pay people to produce original work. None of this is anything you haven’t heard before, but it bears repeating. In order to make a living, those of us who had the bad sense to shackle ourselves to a career in media before that world ended have to churn out more content faster than ever to make up for the drastically reduced pay scale. We’re left with the choice of spending a week reporting a story we’re actually proud of (as I do just frequently enough to ensure a somewhat restful sleep every other night), reaping a grand sum of somewhere in the ballpark of two hundred to five hundred dollars if we’re lucky, or we can grind out ten blog posts at twenty-five to fifty bucks a pop that take fifteen minutes each. That means the work across the board ends up being significantly more disposable, which in turn makes the readers value it less, which means they want to pay less for it, and so on. It’s an ouroboros of shit.

What else is there?

[nikolaygit]

Patent wars?

• "Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings." Source