391–400 of 438 posts
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Why can't software like a music player or playing podcast function perfectly fine w9thout updates for 10 years. We had same audio formats for 10 years, and same OS audio API.
this is my own ignorance, but have codecs not changed or gotten new features in the last 10 years?
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It blows my mind that there are people in this thread who think that a business should charge once for a product that requires iteration or continued backend support.
Of course software needs iteration, but what was wrong with paying for occasional upgrades rather than the continuous trickle of a subscription? I loved this model, it clearly linked revenue earned by new versions to the value provided by the upgrade. IMO, subscriptions are intended to shoehorn users who would only upgrade every few years into the equivalent of the “yearly” upgrade cycle. They’re a way of avoiding th…
I'm a very, very firm believer on not paying for "subscription" to software. New content, I can understand (I spend about 40€ monthly on several Patreons, mostly comic artists; and I have a couple news subscriptions as well), although I still hate music/tv subscriptions and I don't want Netflix, Spotify or whatever. But for software, no matter how useful it is , I just refuse to choose between an unbounded price and…
By the way, I really like this subscription model by Due:
"When you purchase Due, you unlock every feature today, including any new features that will be introduced in the next one year [.....] The Upgrade Pass is an optional subscription that unlocks features permanently, even after the subscription lapses. Any feature unlocked remains available to you forever."
https://dueapp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360053244591-Wh...
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I don't think that's coming back, but it would be nice if they released the binaries once they stop providing servers for a game.
Something called Minecraft seems to disagree with your conclusion.
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> But our businesses are viable as subscription services, and not as one-off or ad-hoc puchase models. Doesn't explain businesses that had been per-purchase for a long time and are now still switching to subscriptions though. (E.g. photoshop, jetbrains...)
These kinds of software used to be always kind of subscription based - as new language features came out, new IDE features got added, the platform got updated to support new OSes, you would find that Company X would release IDE 2.0 Even if for some reason you didn't need all of this, IDE 1.0 would eventually stop getting updated and the bugs would stop getting fixed, so you would naturally need to update. Considering…
> Considering people naturally want the latest and greatest
They often don't. Especially with updates, those are often far more in the interests of the developers than of the users. That's why so much development effort has gone into auto-updating schemes.
Remember how much effort Microsoft had to invest to get people off Windows XP. A large part of their userbase would have been perfectly fine with staying on XP for all eternity. It was Microsoft who wanted them to update to Vista, not the users.
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You would? That seems like an outsized reaction to a broken chair.
Small claims makes low dollar torts fairly straightforward.
@d13 What if the house magically changed shape so the chair couldn't be used any more in that house? Suddenly one day you'll need to sit on the floor and eat, until you had gotten new chairs, for the new shape of the house
Who would you sue (the house or the chair company or no one?)
Or instead, when the house changes shape randomly and whenever, what about paying the chair company for upgrading your chairs to match the new shape of the house (and you'd never have to cook and eat on the floor)
(It makes little sense, I think, to compare software with chairs and houses. Unless the houses are magical as per above)
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> But our businesses are viable as subscription services, and not as one-off or ad-hoc puchase models. Doesn't explain businesses that had been per-purchase for a long time and are now still switching to subscriptions though. (E.g. photoshop, jetbrains...)
It does though. Once a new money-making strategy is found to work by a market participant, others will try that same path (it's a competition). The fact that so many companies are moving to the subscription model shows that it works better than others.
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>Operating systems are starting to make that impossible. Microsoft operating systems have always strived to make that impossible. Apple has to compete somehow. When you push unfinished, not-fully-tested code out the door, even if you can confidently patch it later, it's just never been the most professional thing to do. Especially for something that could be mission-critical like an OS. Getting it into people's hands…
>> "Microsoft operating systems have always strived to make that impossible." That's the one thing I've never seen someone accuse Microsoft of. They're famous for their obsession with backward compatibility. It sounds like you've had a different experience, and now I'm curious. Care to share?
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That's like: Metal and materials are better now than ever before, so shouldn't it be simple, to design new airplanes, nowadays? Why do the aerospace engineers get paid so much
Due to all the frameworks, n0de junk, comp0se blather, I've seen devs write 200 lines of code, for what would have taken 20k lines in 2005. Devs have it do easy now, that many are so abstracted away from DB, OS, network stack, persistence, that they literally have no idea how anything really works. This is desired of course, devs today are in short supply, just like the bow vs the crossbow, years of practise turns in…
I think systems nowadays are larger and more integrated, more complex.
Deployments sometimes are simpler, whilst other things instead are harder. Software will always be pushing the limits.
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Security vulnerabilities are regularly found in many softwares (both online and offline), so that's one reason to upgrade.
Sure, but in some products that's really a non-issue. Like, take photoshop for an example. If you're a photographer that only ever edits your own photos, the odds of a needing a security update for photoshop are really minimal. If you regularly edit photos from clients, maybe it's worth considering.