Except AI companies are not a monopoly, never mind a natural monopoly. When ChatGPT first released it was popular to predict the death of Google because they were "so far behind".
Well after a certain point people have to smell the roses, so to speak. You don't get to control your business 100%, the market tells you what to do a lot of the time.
I think, the reality is, as models become more competitive they are becoming commodities. There's really no reason an app has to be built on GPT, or Gemini. It makes much more sense for apps to be "model agnostic" and let their customers choose which models to use.
I think, if OpenAI sticks to just trying to make their own apps for everything, they will be outrun. People will make apps outside of their ecosystem and will just use them as an API dumb pipe, regardless of if OpenAI wants that. And if they don't want that and restrict it, then their models will fall to the wayside as more competitive models which DO allow that take their place.
They're in a bind here, which is probably why we are seeing this announcement. OpenAI can see the writing on the wall for them.
The reasonable price was $600 in 2000 which is over $1000 adjusted for inflation. That's four years of subscription, the useful life of a perpetual license may not be much more than that.
Your perpetual license on a fixed version of Photoshop would not have been transferrable across OS/compute generations for 25 years.
In practice most longtime Photoshop users paid the $600 once and some $200~ upgrade cost every 2-4 years. Adjusted for inflation its same or more than what you pay now.
If you think you'd be fine now with 25 year old Photoshop features you maybe forget how basic the product was compared to today. Further besides OS compatibility there were file format / camera raw version additions made over time that you'd have wanted.
And there are both cheaper proprietary programs and even free open source programs if they care that much. There are a lot of way cheaper software options, especially on the desktop, in many cases than there were 25 years ago.
You can get 2000-level Photoshop for free from many sources now, so you shouldn't be complaining about cost increases. Paid software has moved upmarket and bundled. The work done by people who need paid software has become more complex and vertically integrated (productivity increase.)
Are you also happy running Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.1 (Puma) which seem to be the last versions officially supported? (I guess on Windows it may have worked in some form or another longer than that but surely it doesn't work anymore on Windows 11 which is the only version currently supported.)
A great secondary point, yes. If you truly believe year 2000 Photoshop was good enough for life, there are plenty of cheap/free options out there today.
Arguably your base desktop/tablet/phone OS editor which is free may already do enough.
Well they are two different words with two different meanings. Both are true in this case. “Available” in the sense “obtainable,” “ready for use,” “suitable for a purpose” or perhaps “available to investors”
The funny thing is that they were indeed funding “trans” mice research:
> To understand the effects of feminizing sex hormone therapy on vaccination, we propose to develop a mouse model of gender-affirming hormone therapy, assess its relevance to human medicine through singe-cell transcriptome studies, and test the immune responses of “cis” vs. “trans” mice to a HIV vaccine.
Nothing has managed to capture the mixtape model. A tangible object made with care you could give as a gift and was unique and valuable. CDs got close but people didn’t have the gear to make them until mp3s had arrived and overshadowed them. Plus CDs with handwritten tracklists didn’t feel as nice as tapes and blank CDs were invariably ugly.
Music as an object is a thing and playlists are in no way the same. You can’t even control the music on a playlist as it’s in the gift of the streamer.
I think the qualities of a cassette mentioned have clearly helped with the mixtape model. But I can't help but wonder if it wasn't also a product of that particular era.
It certainly depends on geographical zones, too, but I remember people burning audio cds for quite a while, and taking them on the go with portable players. This was quite widespread before portable mp3 players became common.
Hell, where I grew up, cassettes were still in regular use until the end of the 90s, and mixtapes had grown increasingly rare.
I don’t know what do you mean by “most of the rest of the world” but it’s widely available in the American continent and Europe coverage will be almost complete in the next month(s):
A capital intensive, low margin business. The dream of every company.
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