On Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:34:00 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <a...@a.a> wrote:
"Steven Schveighoffer" <schvei...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:op.victz4b5eav...@localhost.localdomain...
The only measurable factor for "good" art is how many people use it/buy
it.
That's not a bad point - I can't think of many other metrics for art.
Quality certainly can positively influence popularity. But I think we
have
to be careful not to conflate "popularity" with "quality" too much.
Similar
to the old saying: "What's popular is not always right. What's right is
not
always popular." PHP is wildly popular, but for anyone actually familiar
with a variety of languages, the quality is undeniably poor, so again, we
have to be careful with assuming connections between popularity and
quality.
Imagine if you had to pay for it ;)
For-sale software, books, movies do rather well, so I'm inclined to
believe they are pretty good. There are also some open source/free
materials that do rather well, but they are not nearly as common as
free
materials that are crappy. My point was that for-sale art by far
outperforms freely available art in popularity and usage. When you get
paid to make something, you can do it more often, you get better at it,
and your quality of work goes up.
I'm not disagreeing with the phenomenon you describe, but I think there
are
other contrary factors in play as well:
- For-sale anything tends to have more marketing behind it than free
(because if you're trying to get money for it, you're more motivated to
get
it out in front of people), so that can be a factor in the
popularity/usage
of for-sale things. If you're trying to sell your paintings, you're more
likely to try to go as as many art fairs as you can, get business cards
made
out to hand out, get a spot and display that people will really notice,
push
your website, etc. If your work is free, you have less reason to do all
that, which in turn, works against popularity and usage.
There is that part of it. Some companies can sell whatever they want
because of marketing, i.e. Microsoft. But one thing that for-sale art
does is weed out the unpopular artists. Make a crappy product, and many
people won't buy your next one. Look how hard Vista hit Microsoft despite
their huge marketing machine.
As far as free software advertisement though, most of that is negated by
google these days :) Just yesterday I wanted to find a tool that diff'd
mysql database schemas so I could sync one to the other. In about 10
minutes I found 2-3 candidates that were free and I didn't use any of
them, because they seemed unfinished, or required installing other stuff
just to get it to work. What I ended up using is advise on a forum that
said to just diff the results of the mysqldump.
But I think you would agree the truly great free products/software don't
have a problem with marketing because growth today is viral when someone
finds something that is awesome, free or not.
- Free stuff is more likely to be a labor of love (because if you're not
getting paid for it, why else bother if not because you truly care?),
while
for-sale tends to involve people who just don't give a crap about
anything
but the paycheck. They know something will sell as-is, so why waste the
resources making it as good as they can make it, like the "labor of love"
people would do?
I think most good products are labors of love, even ones that are not
free. There are many cases that are not, and are "just there for the
money," but those usually aren't as successful. As you say, not as much
effort is put into those. But if something is good, and people will pay
for it, why wouldn't you want to charge for it so you can continue doing
it? I don't understand the thought process that necessarily links love
for a job or quality of art to working for free. I love programming, but
love or not, it would just be a toy hobby if I had to spend the majority
of my day doing something else in order to support myself and my family.
Businessmen have long ago learned that, contrary to the old saying, "If
you
build a better mousetrap, the world will NOT beat a path to your door".
Especially if the world doesn't even know you've done so. They'll just
keep
using their inferior, but popular, mousetraps. But if you can *convince*
them you've built a better one, regardless of whether or not it's actualy
true, then they *will*, metaphorically, beat a path to your door.
Yes, there are plenty examples of that.
-Steve
