

Envato or Why Race to the Bottom Is Dangerous - ingve
http://devwp.eu/envato-or-why-race-to-the-bottom-is-dangerous/

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mgkimsal
"Honestly, if your clients don’t understand difference between your work and
cheap crap, you have a problem selling value."

The problem is probably more selling to the wrong folks; there's certain folks
that will never care about anything other than price.

And there's another (larger?) segment of potential customers that won't
understand the difference in quality (in the software arena) until they're hit
with a few malware issues, or a few days of downtime, or a massive cleanup
bill. I've found once people go through that once or twice, they start to
understand why the "$80 website" really is 'too good to be true'.

~~~
nofearinc
While that's correct, it's a global shift in the perception of building
websites.

10 years ago when most CMS weren't that flexible and extensible the majority
of the websites were built from scratch, or with custom frameworks; the
repository of available libraries or extensions wasn't there and people had to
build everything from the ground.

Nowadays there are plenty of tools and services for free, and business owners
with no technical experience start to compare free, cheap and custom. Networks
such as Wix or Squarespace make it possible to build something that makes
sense for a client, and the alternative is way too expensive.

So we're comparing free with $4K or $20K which wasn't quite the case many
years ago. The other market - large and scalable or enterprise products - has
Java, .NET, Ruby and Python as the main tools and clients - naturally - have
different expectations.

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heyalexej
"[...] the marketing power of a community with 4,000,000 members that can
easily pay a quarter of a million¹ dollars in 2014 to its authors [...]."

¹ A quarter of a billion dollars.

~~~
nofearinc
Thanks for the remark

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dropit_sphere
A good read. It makes me wonder: is there a place for a Consumer Reports of
software?

