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A world where people pay for software

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#101

Post by grishka »

steveBK123 wrote: post #83
grishka wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Completely incorrect. Underlying hardware/OS/firmwares/JVM/etc change. Dependencies break. Security updates. Etc. Engineering projects usually hand off maintenance to their owner. Your house/car need maintenance. Your cities roads/bridges/tunnels need maintenance. The difference with software is that maintenance is done by the producers as they own the code.

> Underlying hardware/OS/firmwares/JVM/etc change.

OSes also can be "excellent products". They don't need yearly updates, there's nothing inherent to them that would prevent them from being made perfect, finished and never updated again.

The only case when an otherwise perfect OS would truly need to update is when new hardware capabilities require OS-level changes to support. Sometimes it may be beneficial to expose these new hardware capabilities as APIs for apps to consume. But again, adding new APIs shouldn't break the existing ones. For example, on phones, this would include things like notched screens, fingerprint readers or multiple rear-facing cameras.

> Dependencies break.

Don't update dependencies. Pick one version that serves you well and stick with it forever. I'm serious.

> Security updates.

It seems like we've already realized that writing code that deals with complex data structures received from untrusted parties in memory-unsafe languages like C is a terrible idea. If you exclude memory safety vulnerabilities, the attack surface shrinks drastically. You'd run out of security vulnerabilities pretty fast if you'd have any to begin with.

> Your house/car need maintenance. Your cities roads/bridges/tunnels need maintenance.

Houses, cars, and road infrastructure are made out of atoms and exposed to elements and stress of our imperfect real world. They wear out. Code doesn't. In 100 years, the bits would be the same they are today (as long as you use a reliable enough storage medium).

Re: A world where people pay for software

#102

Post by grishka »

j1elo wrote: post #100
grishka wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there any reason — other than "we're paying our graphic designers full-time salaries so we better get our money's worth" — why OSes have to change so drastically and can't be finished as well, only ever updated to add new APIs for apps and drivers to support new hardware features?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#104

Post by AlexandrB »

steveBK123 wrote: post #94
jehb wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The problem is all the flash in the pan ZIRP VC funded never-profit SaaS startups out there.

The thing is those startups sometimes make very useful software while they're around. I ran Sparrow (an email client from > 10 years ago) for years after the company that made it was shuttered and acquired by Google. If Sparrow was a SaaS product it would be gone 30 days after the acquisition was announced.

> SaaS from established firms seems to be more durable & maintained.

I'm sure many other users have noticed this too. I wonder if it makes breaking into the software space as an upstart firm harder than "in the old days".

Re: A world where people pay for software

#105

Post by MichaelZuo »

xNeil wrote: post #96
MichaelZuo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, I wasn't responding to the first point, of course Microsoft takes backward compatibility seriously.

Though it's possible to mix and match so the OS backwards compatibility isn't the full story.

i.e. a launch copy of Word 2003 works on later OS updates, yet the final patch version of Word 2003 also works on a 2009 launch copy of 7.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#106

Post by greatwave1 »

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 that the incentive to "provide as little value as possible for as much money as possible" is in any way unique to the SAAS pricing model. Theoretically, every optimized pricing model will attempt to maximize revenue at a given value level.

And in practice, what does "get you hooked, take your data hostage" mean? I can't think of many SAAS subscriptions in my personal life where this is a real issue.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#108

Post by intelVISA »

civilized wrote: post #68
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 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 decade…

Single static binary software, the blessed future we never saw.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#109

Post by NickNaraghi »

jovial_cavalier wrote: post #26
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…

If I understand correctly, you are not getting one piece of software. You get access to everything in their library, like a spotify subscription. You also choose which developer gets your $5 or whatever, so you retain the meritocratic infrastructure that a traditional marketplace provides.

Now that you mention it, the spotify subscription is actually very interesting here. A bundled subscription for all the software you use could make sense (though it would probably by 10-100x the cost of a spotify subscription).

However, OP's resource allocation model (each user determines which developer gets their payment) doesn't make sense to me. I think it would be better to prototype multiple resource allocation models in parallel and see which are most fair and sustainable over time.

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