Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although TBF office and windows have gotten worse with every version at least since the 1990s.
They ruined office with … removing Excel’s 64k row limit, better file format, collaborative editing and better data analysis functions?
Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
651–660 of 710 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#652Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are mostly non-sequiturs, with some plausible cases. For example - I don't think subscription licensing for media is moral, and I think legally it's a rife place for some serious case law. Simple example - Recording shows for personal consumption (time shifting) is absolutely allowed under current copyright law. If I subscribe to netflix for a month and record every show I want to watch to my personal NAS... I'…
> But... what if I really do want a moral way to consume netflix content at a later date for a non-recurring, non-changed-at-their-whim cost? Well - sucks to be me because there's literally no way to buy it. I think that's also fairly immoral. I'm literally being held captive to a subscription for eternity, with no way to negotiate the deal, and the real loss of any catalogue item at any time with no recourse. Moral?…
You cannot buy Netflix original movies on DVD or blu-ray. They do sell some of their series (although not all of them - mostly just the very popular entries).
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#653Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't give them any ideas. Could you imagine having to have separate subscriptions for O'Reilly, Shuster, and Penguin, etc.
They already got the idea. Look up the "O'Reilly Learning Platform"
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#655New models of Fitbit require a subscription to unlock the full feature set – I decided not to upgrade the device at all as long as the old one still works.
There are one-off purchases for services – e.g. generate an AI video in order to gift it to someone. Many services provide monthly subscriptions with a fixed amount of credits. For creators and folks with businesses subscriptions make sense, but for occasional, one-time use it makes zero sense. While I'd be willing to just pay-per-use, I will walk away from services offering subscriptions only.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#656Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#657Earlier quoted context omitted.
They already got the idea. Look up the "O'Reilly Learning Platform"
I find that alright actually. It gives one access to a lot of books, not just O'Reilly ones. You can scan trough a lot of books there, and buy paper copies (elsewhere) of those you want for your bookshelf
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've mixed subscription based services (Google storage space) and content (Spotify) with subscription based software. For services, it might make sense. Even so, what exactly is "getting better all the time" about Spotify the software? It's been the same for like 5 years now. As for the rest: 1Password declined (turned to Electron shit), Creative Cloud keeps adding bloat while not adressing decades standing issues,…
IntelliJ has arguably one of the best subscription models for tools. It works offline and they have fallback licenses so if they doubled the price and I cancel I’m still legally entitled to a recent version that I’ll probably be happy enough with until I find the motivation to replace it with something else. If Adobe worked like that I’d be like 75% pissed off at their products and pricing.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#659I just surveyed the market for bug tracking systems, and ended up installing Redmine to get away from saas. I installed it with a template onto a cloud server in a couple of clicks. It is not sexy, but it is robust... and exactly what I needed!
So.. you moved the software to a server that runs in the cloud. So sorta-SaaS? ;-)
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#660Not really, because I saw too many software companies go out of business because not enough people wound up upgrading to the next major version -- the ownership model of software can be awfully feast-or-famine for developers' income, it's a very tough/risky business model. Generally speaking, I'm happy to pay a subscription because this way I get a steady stream of all the updates, and it's much more likely the compa…
It's so much worse when a subscription business fails. You can lose access to your data with very little notice to migrate. At least standalone software keeps working for a while after the company maintaining it is gone.