Companies can't just continue raising and burning money forever. At some point they have to charge an amount that's worth the value they provide. We're weirdly not used to that concept after a decade or more of low interest rates, but it's something we're going to need to get familiar with - paying for things we use that save us or make us money.
Or, we decide that at the price of free it was worth it, but we don't like it enough to pay anything. There are certainly things like that for me.
I do agree with the sentiment that we have become too accostumed to not paying for certain things. The question is whether I like it enough to pay to keep it around.
I agree. People seem to imagine there's some evil cartoon character twirling a moustache figuring out how to comically oppress them, when the reality is usually a lot more mundane.
Ehh threes a bit of mustache twirling. Unity isn't profitable becsuse it didn't charge enough. It's not profitable because it was focused on growth and promising big profits later. A strategy that worked for some of the largest sites out there.
This generates bad pr with customers becsuse customers just want their (very long standing) issues fixed and instead they announce a billion dollar acquisition-merge with ad tech and a bunch of other new products for different industries. So when the pricing changes hit these already frustrated customers, the backlash was severe. You don't fix the core issues and charge more for the engine you broke in some places?
If we had shareholders happy with steady profits we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with. They'd focus on the core product and have much leaner teams that do R&D for maybe 1-2 new products. But that's now how the stock market works.
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