Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#401

Post by luckylion » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 6:23 AM UTC

WoahNoun wrote: post #369

crazygringo wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to be super-imaginative, I'm trying to be realistic. That's the point. Considering Office 365 is $10/mo (before volume discounts) and is probably the main tool most office workers use, I am having a hard time how on earth you get to $10K/12=$833/mo. I'm supposed to believe the average office worker uses a total of subscription software that is eighty times more expensive than Microsoft Office?

Accounting software, payroll software, financial planning software, supply chain management/inventory, health insurance/401k/benefits/PTO software, JIRA/Ticketing, knowledge management (sharepoint/internal wiki/confluence), data warehouse licenses, reporting software (tableau, looker), IT and device management software, expense and reimbursement, business travel scheduling, performance management, contract management…

You've listed a ton of tools, but not every office employee uses those, and I hope that payroll software isn't costing $1000 per employee/year.

To get to those large numbers, you'll need to hand-pick companies that have few non-specialized employees.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#402

Post by Silhouette » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 6:25 AM UTC

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #397

peteforde wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keylogging is illegal almost everywhere. If you suspect that your current or former employer is monitoring people's keystrokes, please contact the appropriate authorities to start a whistleblower process.

Keylogging of any company provided hardware is probably legal as you have no expectation of privacy.

Fortunately, much of the world is more enlightened than this, and its legal systems do favour the privacy of employees over the voyeuristic ambitions of bad management under normal circumstances. In many places, the idea that you have no entitlement to personal privacy just because you are working for someone else would be widely derided.

There are often special cases in the laws for when covert monitoring is genuinely justified, for example when there is a reasonable suspicion of wrong-doing by an employee or there are serious security concerns that legitimately require stronger measures. But intrusive surveillance by default, even of employees using company resources on company time, is not permitted in these jurisdictions.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#403

Post by Silhouette » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 6:32 AM UTC

Serow225 wrote: post #389

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely out of curiousity -- what software costs $35k per seat per year??

Lots of engineering software does. FPGA toolchains, CAD, simulation. Not uncommon.

Having worked in several related areas, but not very recently, the costs for specialist software packages were certainly much higher than people think of for basic office software, but nowhere near the scale we're talking about here. Have things truly become so crazy that five-figure annual fees for these packages are the norm? A permanent licence used to cost less per user than that! But then I suppose this is the point the article is making.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#404

Post by peteforde » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 6:34 AM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #402

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keylogging of any company provided hardware is probably legal as you have no expectation of privacy.

Fortunately, much of the world is more enlightened than this, and its legal systems do favour the privacy of employees over the voyeuristic ambitions of bad management under normal circumstances. In many places, the idea that you have no entitlement to personal privacy just because you are working for someone else would be widely derided. There are often special cases in the laws for when covert monitoring is genuine…

Beautifully said.

I would only add that in the extraordinary case of a legal investigation, there's still no room for vigilante spying by the employer themselves. Presumably, law enforcement would take necessary steps to intervene, not the employer.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#405

Post by HenryBemis » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 6:56 AM UTC

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #397

peteforde wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keylogging is illegal almost everywhere. If you suspect that your current or former employer is monitoring people's keystrokes, please contact the appropriate authorities to start a whistleblower process.

Keylogging of any company provided hardware is probably legal as you have no expectation of privacy.

Ladies and Gentlemen no fighting!!

Why bother logging keystrokes and clicks, when there is BlueCoat that in real time decrypts, reads, logs/reports, encrypts EVERYTHING that comes in and out of your PC?

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#406

Post by brazzy » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 6:59 AM UTC

TuringNYC wrote: post #361

IggleSniggle wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Key and click logging What kind of dystopian Corporate hellscapes have you worked in? This is totally unacceptable. I would not submit myself to that kind of scrutiny or micromanagement, no matter how benign the intentions of it's implementor. Nothing good can come of it.

>> I would not submit myself to that kind of scrutiny or micromanagement In many cases, you may not even realize it is running.

That just makes it super extra illegal.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#407

Post by Rury » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 7:00 AM UTC

peteforde wrote: post #393

This article is painfully stupid. I don't mean wrong; it's actually intellectually insulting to the reader. "And we still don’t know where this is going." Spare us. First of all, being able to build an entire company faster and cheaper than ever before by taking advantage of a massive ecosystem of SaaS tools isn't just worth millions, it's the only reason many companies can get off the ground. Second, SaaS tools have…

Not sure I understand you.

From your post, it sounds like you have beef with people who complain about SaaS costs, when many SaaS products are arguably cheap, cover valuable functions like DBAs used to, and allows many companies to get off the ground in the first place? All while proponents of SaaS are fundamentally no different than companies like SAP or Hedge funds that are making billions via rent-seeking off open source software?

Yeah well, I think that's the same reason people complain about SaaS costs. I know some SaaS software my company uses that wouldn't cost us anywhere near what we pay for it, if we opted to build our own via open source tools and maintained it ourselves in house...

SaaS is effectively the same as outsourcing - you're paying a third-party service provider for software/IT functions. Companies complaining that SaaS is cutting into their profit margins, are no different than ones complaining that their IT department is cutting into their profit margins.

The matter is really about which is cheaper (to make in house vs buy). In some cases it's cheaper to outsource and in other cases it's not.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#408

Post by shapiro92 » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 7:29 AM UTC

The problem for me is the pricing system. Pay per user per month? No having 100 or 101 users does not add an operational cost user*base fee.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#409

Post by pm90 » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 7:29 AM UTC

Rury wrote: post #407

peteforde wrote: post #393

This article is painfully stupid. I don't mean wrong; it's actually intellectually insulting to the reader. "And we still don’t know where this is going." Spare us. First of all, being able to build an entire company faster and cheaper than ever before by taking advantage of a massive ecosystem of SaaS tools isn't just worth millions, it's the only reason many companies can get off the ground. Second, SaaS tools have…

Not sure I understand you. From your post, it sounds like you have beef with people who complain about SaaS costs, when many SaaS products are arguably cheap, cover valuable functions like DBAs used to, and allows many companies to get off the ground in the first place? All while proponents of SaaS are fundamentally no different than companies like SAP or Hedge funds that are making billions via rent-seeking off open…

> Companies complaining that SaaS is cutting into their profit margins, are no different than ones complaining that their IT department is cutting into their profit margins.

You’re betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of how software deployments work for most businesses.

Theoretically, the choice is between an expensive SaaS product and its equivalent OSS product which would need to be deployed in house. What this scenario misses is that most businesses have really ineffective IT departments which absolutely do not have the ability to:

- deploy the OSS versions

- guarantee an SLO for the deployment

- provide tooling around the OSS deployment

Remember that here I’m talking about most businesses; specifically those outside the SV bubble.

So SaaS is fundamentally different from outsourcing. The promise of outsourcing is heavily skewed towards reducing costs and SLOs hardly figure into consideration. SaaS tools might be expensive but they guarantee some things. Predictability is hard to get in the software industry; SaaS businesses promise that. Their success reveals a deep desire in the market for predictability around software products. Unless you have a highly qualified SRE team I doubt you can promise the SLOs promised by SaaS vendors.

Re: Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)

#410

Post by fock » Fri, Mar 06, 2020, 8:20 AM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #403

Serow225 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of engineering software does. FPGA toolchains, CAD, simulation. Not uncommon.

Having worked in several related areas, but not very recently, the costs for specialist software packages were certainly much higher than people think of for basic office software, but nowhere near the scale we're talking about here. Have things truly become so crazy that five-figure annual fees for these packages are the norm? A permanent licence used to cost less per user than that! But then I suppose this is the p…

it is. And especially for SMBs, the cost was way less in the past. Imagine a small mechanical engineering company: 10 years ago they'd have 5 seats of a 5 year old AutoCAD/ProEngineer/Solidworks version, sneakily locking them in but basically no recurring costs. If a new customer needed a new version, they bought one seat for that and kept the old ones, gradually upgrading. Nowadays they pay half the single-seat cost per year because of "continouus updates" (for the UI mainly, so that they can sell trainings)