On 15/12/2022 12.58, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
On Thu, 15 Dec 2022 09:50:21 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'Mozilla's Firefox once commanded a large chunk of the browser market share, but now it stands under a pitiful 5 percent.'
What is a “market”? It’s where participants trade things of value. Like where one party provides a good or service to another, and the other party pays them money for it.
Where is the “market” when you are downloading and using a piece of software for free? There isn’t one.
What about "barter"? No "money"! What fair-exchange? Peter mentions AKL-events at a HAM-meeting, and I mention HAM-events vice-versa. Worse: what is "money"? Fast disappearing coins and notes which only claim to represent 'value'. Mozilla 'give' me a $free browser (in fact they incur significant costs). I respond with feedback. 'Telemetry' informs usage. Usage-stats can be used to design training courses. ...and so the list/chain goes on. Meantime, the economists amongst us will invert 'value' to consider "opportunity cost". If Firefox did not exist, what would be the socio-economic effect? To imagine that, one only has to cast-back a few years, to when MS-Internet Explorer was the dominant web-browser, and market-saturation led them to allow the facility (and web.dev generally) to stagnate. "The Market" reacted to that, with a "Correction", and now we have Chromium (and MS-Edge), considerably improved 'products', and a rapid pace of change. A market is a meeting place. A part of society. The word can be used in both narrow definition and wide application. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/market.asp --