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A world where people pay for software

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#61

Post by teeray »

nightski wrote: post #37
chadash wrote: post #28

The link doesn’t talk about the SAAS model, which is probably the most profitable (and ubiquitous) one these days. I know people like to rail against it, but I actually like the SAAS model. It keeps incentives aligned. It used to be that I might shell out $200 for a piece of productivity software. Now, I might pay $10 a month instead. The thing is that under the old model, a company was incentivized by make a sale bu…

I feel it's the opposite. The incentive is to lock you in and provide as little value as possible for as much money as possible. Get you hooked, take your data hostage, and then jack up the price as much as possible while delivering little to no additional functionality. Bugs? who cares. Broken functionality? No big deal. You are locked in baby!

It reminds me of the dining hall at my university. The food would always be unbelievably good on parents weekend and any time there were tours that would eat there. Every other time it was mediocre at best. The check for the meal plan money cleared and the goal was to give back the bare minimum.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#62

Post by bena »

masukomi wrote: post #55
MichaelZuo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people are using copies of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel 2003 just fine, which received literally zero 'maintenance' for at least a decade or more depending on personal preferences. For most software that can be sold in a box, without an attached cloud service, this approach works. EDIT: Also some fraction would be using them on computers that literally haven't been upgraded or connected to the internet for a…

if you think those aren't receiving maintenance you're not paying attention or are ignorant as to how hard it is to keep a complex app compiling as operating systems move forward. Not receiving new features is VERY different from not receiving maintenance. It is wholly implausible to believe that there has been zero energy spent on keeping those codebases working in the past 10 years.

Support for Office 2003 ended in 2014. Close to a decade ago. No maintenance, no patches, no service packs, nothing. No energy expended working on that codebase.

Office 2016 is going EOL in two years.

That's from Microsoft themselves. They do not hide these facts or make it hard to find.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#63

Post by belugacat »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #54
inglor_cz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making an excellent product is hard, but what is really hard, is maintaining it for years and decades afterwards. Maintenance, addition of new functionality, bugfixing, porting to other platforms etc. takes easily 10x-50x time than the initial release, and eats the vast majority of the developers' time and energy. This is where "not being paid for your work" translates into abandoned projects.

Plenty of people are using copies of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel 2003 just fine, which received literally zero 'maintenance' for at least a decade or more depending on personal preferences. For most software that can be sold in a box, without an attached cloud service, this approach works. EDIT: Also some fraction would be using them on computers that literally haven't been upgraded or connected to the internet for a…

It is amusing that your argument for software not needing “maintenance” is pointing out 3 pieces of software that had each received 20 years of maintenance by the time they reached the year you picked, 2003.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#64

Post by lawn »

nightski wrote: post #37
chadash wrote: post #28

The link doesn’t talk about the SAAS model, which is probably the most profitable (and ubiquitous) one these days. I know people like to rail against it, but I actually like the SAAS model. It keeps incentives aligned. It used to be that I might shell out $200 for a piece of productivity software. Now, I might pay $10 a month instead. The thing is that under the old model, a company was incentivized by make a sale bu…

I feel it's the opposite. The incentive is to lock you in and provide as little value as possible for as much money as possible. Get you hooked, take your data hostage, and then jack up the price as much as possible while delivering little to no additional functionality. Bugs? who cares. Broken functionality? No big deal. You are locked in baby!

What exactly is the difference from paying up front?

There there's even less incentives to fix bugs, fix broken functionality and god forbid new functionality.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#65

Post by [deleted] »

robalni wrote: post #25
a254613e wrote: post #9

Besides being sick of subscriptions for every small thing, I'm not sure I understand the premise here: "Pay to download or for other services: Not worth it; users can find the software somewhere else and they don't need your other services." So users won't pay a one-time fee, but instead they will pay a subscription to get that one software they need? They won't "find the software somewhere else" if it's behind a sub…

The thing is that this solution scales better. If you had to pay all developers individually, that would not be worth it but with my solution, you have to pay only one. Also, it doesn't have to be a subscription. The payment is 100% up to the developers that you pay, so they could sell a one time payment and register a lifetime subscription in this system for that.

[deleted]

Re: A world where people pay for software

#66

Post by tiffanyh »

grishka wrote: post #60

Speaking of software business models, I like the idea of charging money for convenience. As in, make the app open-source, but sell compiled binaries and maybe tech support.

That’s the AWS model.

Take a free open source product, and charge for hosting & maintaining it.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#67

Post by MichaelZuo »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #58
MichaelZuo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people are using copies of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel 2003 just fine, which received literally zero 'maintenance' for at least a decade or more depending on personal preferences. For most software that can be sold in a box, without an attached cloud service, this approach works. EDIT: Also some fraction would be using them on computers that literally haven't been upgraded or connected to the internet for a…

Microsoft also makes Windows, and Windows takes backwards compatibility very seriously. Even if they don't work on maintaining Office 2003 directly, they indirectly work very hard making sure every subsequent version of Windows does not break Office 2003.

No, they are perfectly usable and functional even on Windows XP or Vista or 7 computers that haven't been touched or connected to the internet since 2012.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#68

Post by civilized »

masukomi wrote: post #55
MichaelZuo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people are using copies of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel 2003 just fine, which received literally zero 'maintenance' for at least a decade or more depending on personal preferences. For most software that can be sold in a box, without an attached cloud service, this approach works. EDIT: Also some fraction would be using them on computers that literally haven't been upgraded or connected to the internet for a…

if you think those aren't receiving maintenance you're not paying attention or are ignorant as to how hard it is to keep a complex app compiling as operating systems move forward. Not receiving new features is VERY different from not receiving maintenance. It is wholly implausible to believe that there has been zero energy spent on keeping those codebases working in the past 10 years.

I don't think you understand. Office 2003 (or earlier) and similar products aren't constantly phoning home for updates like more recent software. Millions of people have had a single 100% static binary for these programs running on their computer for many years. The ability to phone home, if it exists at all, may even be broken or disabled.

This is in fact how all software worked until, I don't know, about two decades ago? Things being patched was a big deal, a voluntary manual process, and didn't happen often. The update would even have a well-known name like "Service Pack 2".

The idea that all software must be constantly maintained is recent and the assumption that it is necessary is mostly self-imposed by the software business. Users don't share this assumption, and in fact on many products, updates are viewed mostly neutral to negatively, other than perhaps critical security updates on products that are used in connection to the internet or untrusted data.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#69

Post by 7e »

gizmo wrote: post #21

Software has no marginal cost. You can make something that's used by untold millions of people. Even if many people pirate enough people won't for you to recoup your development cost and then some. Software is easier to produce, sell, and distribute than any physical product. You don't have to worry about warehouses filled with unsold inventory. You don't have to worry about quality control and returns. It still blow…

Not at all. Software has low marginal cost, but that has high fixed costs that need a monetizable market to sustain. Good software takes effort and great people. Those are expensive. If you can't monetize you can't put people on your software and it will suck (like most OSS software, for example). Physical manufacturing is hard, but at least it brings in dollars. OSS, privacy and wankers reverse engineering your software shrinks your market substantially.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#70

Post by grishka »

inglor_cz wrote: post #33
gizmo wrote: post #21

Software has no marginal cost. You can make something that's used by untold millions of people. Even if many people pirate enough people won't for you to recoup your development cost and then some. Software is easier to produce, sell, and distribute than any physical product. You don't have to worry about warehouses filled with unsold inventory. You don't have to worry about quality control and returns. It still blow…

Making an excellent product is hard, but what is really hard, is maintaining it for years and decades afterwards. Maintenance, addition of new functionality, bugfixing, porting to other platforms etc. takes easily 10x-50x time than the initial release, and eats the vast majority of the developers' time and energy. This is where "not being paid for your work" translates into abandoned projects.

An excellent product doesn't need maintenance if it doesn't rely on any online services. Once it's done, it's done. It does everything it needs and nothing it doesn't need.

Engineering projects usually have a finished state. Software engineering is no different, no matter how much the industry wants you to believe otherwise.

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