The State of the GUI

[Joakim]

On Thursday, 25 October 2018 at 08:06:32 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> You can never expand your market-share by focusing on a 
> shrinking market. And there are two ways a market segment can 
> shrink (absolute). It can get smaller itself (absolute), or it 
> can just not grow while the overall market expands (relative). 
> I think native toolkits are shrinking relative to the overall 
> market. But either way, never chase the shrinking market. 
> Especially when the tool that supports the growing market is a 
> superset of the shrinking tool.

When reading this thread, I was going to make the same point 
about shrinking markets, except towards the opposite aim that the 
GUI toolkit market itself is not worth pursuing. The software 
market that is actually growing worldwide is one stripped of 
chrome, where you simply build a software service on an existing 
text or voice-based platform, like WeChat in China or 
Alexa/Google-Assistant in the west:

https://qz.com/1331650/an-app-built-just-for-wechat-hints-at-googles-new-china-plan/

Attempts have been made to replicate WeChat's success in other 
countries, such as with the Google Assistant, Allo, or Siri, but 
obviously it hasn't taken off in the US... yet:

https://www.wired.com/2015/08/time-to-ditch-texting/

Everybody believes that is just a matter of time though, and with 
speakers and other home-based connected hardware taking off, the 
importance of voice-driven software interaction is only 
increasing. That's why people are now writing strategic analyses 
of how the big players are doing in this fast-growing and 
important market:

https://stratechery.com/2018/the-battle-for-the-home/

Building your own GUI toolkit is very much an '80s or '90s 
mindset, back when that was paramount. It isn't anymore, and 
would be a waste of time to try with D.

Of course, there's always going to be a small and lucrative niche 
of people using old-fashioned apps written with a GUI toolkit, 
just as there's still people running COBOL, so if you really want 
to build for that shrinking market, go for it. But I think it 
would be a mistake for the D community to spend too much of its 
meager resources on that backward-looking market.