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A world where people pay for software

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#91

Post by buggy6257 »

7e wrote: post #69
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 soft…

I'm not sure I get your argument. Basically everything you're talking about applies to physical manufacturing too. You have high fixed costs (equipment, location, assembly line workers, what have you), and you also have marginal cost (software basically has zero marginal cost). Good physical goods also take effort, and great people to design them.

> Physical manufacturing is hard, but it at least brings in dollars

You say this as if it's some indelible fact that if you make a physical product, it WILL be bought and you WILL make a profit no matter what, but I think it's safe to say this is objectively false, as many failed physical business would attest to.

> OSS, privacy and wankers reverse engineering your software shrinks your market substantially.

As opposed to in the physical world, where nobody ever cribs your ideas and sells them at a discount compared to you... AKA "Amazon's business model"? (not to mention overseas knockoffs of products

Given all these things being equal then, software has all the same benefits that your parent comment mentioned, while staying at best EQUAL with physical manufacturing, save for maybe higher salaries to the people making your product (arguable in some cases, but on average probably true) but this difference pales in comparison to not having to own a warehouse and manage last-mile shipping costs etc.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#92

Post by adamc »

Lacerda69 wrote: post #75
bena wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You vastly underestimate the complexity involved. Also, new attacks get discovered that were not even dreamed 20 years ago. There is no "just get it right" when right is measured by what we know, and that keeps changing.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#93

Post by carlosjobim »

Knee_Pain wrote: post #39

I think the biggest problem is the financial infrastructure. We pay for software almost exclusively through digital means, but the fees are too damn high. Imagine if transaction fees were zero. Imagine if a piece of software you used costed 10 cents per months. Or someone's patreon or github sponsor was 5 cents per month. And then imagine if starting and stopping the subscription was intuitive and super easy with any…

From experience I know this truth: Somebody who won't pay $5 per month will never pay $1 per month nor will they ever pay 10 cents per month.

Something in the mind switches and people turn full on psychotic when it comes to paying for digital services, and there's not much that you can do to fight it with logic.

Just look at Github projects for some really good stuff that are used by thousands or millions. At most the developers will have received 10-20 donations. Almost all of the commenters here on HN have never donated a single dollar to the projects that they love and enjoy.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#94

Post by steveBK123 »

jehb wrote: post #81
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…

This has not been my experience at all with SaaS. I find SaaS products, including ones I have paid for, disappear at a much greater rate than the rate at which the desktop tools they replaced stop working. There's also next to nothing I can do as an end user when they do disappear. If I'm very lucky, I get a limited window to be able to export a portion of my data. But we've eroded data formats to the point where eve…

SaaS from established firms seems to be more durable & maintained. The problem is all the flash in the pan ZIRP VC funded never-profit SaaS startups out there. Hopefully these get shaken out over the next couple years finally.

For example, I've used Adobe products for a very long time, and they get a lot of flack. I was an extensive user of Photoshop (PS) and Lightroom (LR) for a long time.

However, the old model was - PS pay $600 once, then $200 for updates every 2 years or so. LR was $200/100 as I recall. So your run-rate for both was over $150/year (factoring in the initial $800). This was in like year 2000 dollars.

For $150 2023 dollars.. I get constant feature updates, cloud storage & sync, licensed to run on at least 2 machines, etc. Inflation adjusted this is nearly half the price of paying $150 in 2000.

I'm also intrigued by how many very wealthy people are unwilling to pay $10/mo to stream music/video and/or share passwords, when I recall paying $20/CD at the record store in 1998 dollars. You can listen to basically every song you want for the year for the price of (inflation adjusted) 2.5 CDs purchased by my mallrat teenage self back then.

I think we are all just very spoiled..

Re: A world where people pay for software

#95

Post by [deleted] »

lawn wrote: post #64
nightski wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: A world where people pay for software

#96

Post by xNeil »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #67
saint_fiasco wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not backward compatibility then - those are the systems it was made for (Windows 7 would then have been made backwards compatible for Office 2003).

It's backward compatibility if Word 2003 runs on the later Windows versions - like Windows 10 and 11. I don't know the answer to that, but I'm sure someone here does.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#98

Post by [deleted] »

Otek wrote: post #19

I know people hate Subscriptions but honestly I quite like them. I can pay for one month usually not very high price to use software when I need it. Problem is to be solved by developers, they should give more often option to buy lifetime license, or allow you to use software for lifetime after you payed for 1 year of subscription (without updates). It’s just not profitable enough I believe. Maybe we will have approp…

[deleted]

Re: A world where people pay for software

#99

Post by pjc50 »

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…

The problem with software's non-physical nature is that it has runaway market dominance issues. Software, especially software that interacts with other software, tends to be either open-source maintained by a "community" or a thinly veiled world domination plan.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#100

Post by j1elo »

grishka wrote: post #70
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.

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.

Software engineering is like if a car was built and thus "finished", but the systems it depends on (like roads, and gas stations) changed every N years (with N Imagine the gas stations (operating system) changed the kind of fuel they dispense every few years. No, by no means a car (software) that is fully finished today would be able to continue doing its thing tomorrow, without ongoing updates.

This also happens in the real world, it's just that changes are more likely in the decades or centuries, so we as humans don't perceive them so well.

The fact that Microsoft spends a whole lot of money to avoid this, is circumstantial. Apple doesn't so much, and at some point your finished software will stop working with newer MacOS releases if you don't update it to the newer system versions.

Linux is even more of a moving target. Good luck having a perfectly well working compiled program today, and trying to run it in 10 years time.

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