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A world where people pay for software

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#71

Post by AlexandrB »

XCSme wrote: post #56
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.

Completely agree. Nowadays, software is different from the CD era, where you bought a game/software and that was it. Nowadays, people expect the software to be maintained, kept up to date and always compatible with the latest changes (new OS versions, compatibility with other software, etc.). Maintenance is the high cost of software, not building it. This is why I sell my products with a perpetual license but with pa…

I think there are a few interesting threads to pick at here.

First, some of these problems are created by software developers themselves. In particular, shoving in an online component where one doesn't need to exist basically guarantees that you will have recurring costs and the need for constant maintenance.

Second, Microsoft is much more careful about maintaining backwards compatibility than Apple. I can generally fire up 10+ year old software on Windows 10, no problem. The same is sometimes true on OSX/iOS, but often not. The increasing popularity of Apple products and the lower priority they place on backwards compatibility has definitely made developers' lives harder.

Having said all that, I don't think everybody expects constant updates. I think power users, especially, are used to running what works for them for long periods of time. You probably can't build the next Google on this, but a lifestyle business? Certainly. Just look at Pinboard and it's lack of enhancements or UI overhauls - and that's an online service.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#72

Post by r00fus »

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!

Where have you experienced data lockin? That sounds like poor SaaS strategies from the 2000s.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#73

Post by grishka »

tiffanyh wrote: post #66
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.

Yeah, if it's a server app, you can also sell it as a hosted service.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#74

Post by ape4 »

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…

Funny you mentioned 2003 since that's the exact version Ms Office I use ;)

Re: A world where people pay for software

#75

Post by Lacerda69 »

bena wrote: post #62
masukomi wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And?

I find it mindboggling that a simple program like text processors have to be continually updated for decades. Just program it right once for god sakes.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#76

Post by j1elo »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #59
masukomi wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm not sure what to say to this... you can just buy an old copy of Office 2003 on eBay, an old Windows XP computer, and boot it up and try it out? You don't have to believe me, I imagine practically every reader on HN has the means to verify this for themselves.

That kind of rethoric doesn't fly too far... Your original point was

> Plenty of people are using Word, Powerpoint, and Excel 2003 just fine

Are you claiming that a reasonable majority (for the sake of discussion) of this plenty of people are using Office 2003 on Windows XP machines??

I'd doubt it. More like there's plenty of people using old software in modern versions of Windows. The maintenance work, of course, exists and has been done indirectly, by Microsoft, in the development iterations of Windows itself.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#77

Post by MichaelZuo »

belugacat wrote: post #63
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…

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.

I've edited my comment since it appears your the third person confused as to the possibility of using them on older computers.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#78

Post by ZephyrBlu »

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!

I don't think this is connected with reality. Most companies don't have such strong lock-in, and those that do often have extremely valuable products.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#79

Post by AlexandrB »

pmontra wrote: post #40
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.

The traditional way to fund maintenance was to release a new and better version of the product. Example, all the releases of the various office suites from the days of MS-DOS up to Windows up to the cloud. If sales decline, sell to a competitor (good timing required) or close and switch to something else. A company that paid salaries for 5-10 years is still nothing to be ashamed of. In the case of Apple, keep selling…

> I can't remember if they ever sold their software in the first years of Macs or if it was bundled with the hardware.

In the early OSX era they used to sell their office suite separately. Eventually it got bundled with hardware for free. They still sell some software, like Final Cut Pro.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#80

Post by Kinrany »

robalni wrote: post #38
Kinrany wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would developers use this over just asking for money? What are you going to do about people asking for 1 cent to join the network?

> Why would developers use this over just asking for money? More people should want to pay if they use this system because if you just ask for money, you either don't give anything in return (donations) or you give access to your stuff, but with this system, the user gets access to everything that uses this system. > What are you going to do about people asking for 1 cent to join the network? Developers can sell subs…

> limited number of subscriptions to sell

Oh, I don't remember the website mentioning this. How does this work, and what are the implications?

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