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A world where people pay for software

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#161

Post by pharrington »

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…

Somebody has to maintain the software, be it the devs or the end users.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#162

Post by SoftTalker »

ryandrake wrote: post #125
vishnugupta wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, sure, this is what all the business books, MBAs have been saying since 60s. However, since then we have come to learn a lot about software. The most important of which is that software, just like physical products, needs maintenance. The world is constantly changing and evolving, and software has to keep up otherwise it'll become obsolete within couple of years. At the very least it must be patched up with ne…

> At the very least it must be patched up with newly discovered security threats. I'd say at the very most it needs security updates. Too much software changes just to change. UI redesigns for the sake of redesign, cramming features that nobody wants so a product owner can get promoted, adding telemetry and analytics to chase metrics that no user cares about, adding annoying notifications and popups to juice "engagem…

On the other hand, the reality experienced by software companies is that adding features is profitable. Joel Spolsky talks about this in one of his old blog posts[1]: "I can tell you that nothing we have ever done at Fog Creek has increased our revenue more than releasing a new version with more features."

It makes sense though, if software companies could make just as much money doing less work, they certainly would.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/

Re: A world where people pay for software

#163

Post by paulddraper »

ryandrake wrote: post #125
vishnugupta wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, sure, this is what all the business books, MBAs have been saying since 60s. However, since then we have come to learn a lot about software. The most important of which is that software, just like physical products, needs maintenance. The world is constantly changing and evolving, and software has to keep up otherwise it'll become obsolete within couple of years. At the very least it must be patched up with ne…

> At the very least it must be patched up with newly discovered security threats. I'd say at the very most it needs security updates. Too much software changes just to change. UI redesigns for the sake of redesign, cramming features that nobody wants so a product owner can get promoted, adding telemetry and analytics to chase metrics that no user cares about, adding annoying notifications and popups to juice "engagem…

The reason that desktop world existed is because computing was very localized.

Now people use it in very interconnected ways.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#164

Post by steveBK123 »

grishka wrote: post #101
steveBK123 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> there's nothing inherent to them that would prevent them from being made perfect, finished and never updated again.

theres this thing called the internet, to which the OS connects, filled with adversarial actors, so no this is not correct at all

Re: A world where people pay for software

#165

Post by paulddraper »

causi wrote: post #160
vishnugupta wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, sure, this is what all the business books, MBAs have been saying since 60s. However, since then we have come to learn a lot about software. The most important of which is that software, just like physical products, needs maintenance. The world is constantly changing and evolving, and software has to keep up otherwise it'll become obsolete within couple of years. At the very least it must be patched up with ne…

otherwise it'll become obsolete within couple of years. At the very least it must be patched up with newly discovered security threats. Only if it talks to the internet. I have plenty of software I downloaded over a decade ago that has no internet access and runs perfectly fine on Windows 11. Much of it is even older than that. Just stop trying to cram social media integration into your label-making program and it ge…

> only if it talks to the internet

So.... Most software.

Agreed

Re: A world where people pay for software

#166

Post by mrlemke »

ryandrake wrote: post #125
vishnugupta wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, sure, this is what all the business books, MBAs have been saying since 60s. However, since then we have come to learn a lot about software. The most important of which is that software, just like physical products, needs maintenance. The world is constantly changing and evolving, and software has to keep up otherwise it'll become obsolete within couple of years. At the very least it must be patched up with ne…

> At the very least it must be patched up with newly discovered security threats. I'd say at the very most it needs security updates. Too much software changes just to change. UI redesigns for the sake of redesign, cramming features that nobody wants so a product owner can get promoted, adding telemetry and analytics to chase metrics that no user cares about, adding annoying notifications and popups to juice "engagem…

Why would I pay my developers to do bug fixes if you've only paid me once? Bug fixes are the user's problem, so why should I have to pay for it?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#167

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

vishnugupta wrote: post #112
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…

I mean, sure, this is what all the business books, MBAs have been saying since 60s. However, since then we have come to learn a lot about software. The most important of which is that software, just like physical products, needs maintenance. The world is constantly changing and evolving, and software has to keep up otherwise it'll become obsolete within couple of years. At the very least it must be patched up with ne…

> otherwise it'll become obsolete within couple of years

I mean, sure, this is what all the software developers have been saying...

In the meantime, I'm constantly seeing users, even here on HN, complaining about how their favorite software tools are changing. Users the world over annoyed at SaaS, and pining for installable software that they can just put on a machine and never have to worry about forced upgrades or annual maintenance fees, etc., or even the convenience of not needing an internet connection for it to work.

The software world has never been black and white. There are product niches, and also use-case niches. You could probably make a good business by choosing something that's only available as SaaS and releasing a local-only version of it.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#168

Post by chromoblob »

cscheid wrote: post #152
chromoblob wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As N of people → ∞, chances for software to break → finite maximum. And for good enough software you should consider that maximum already regardless of the number of users.

> And for good enough software you should consider that maximum already for any number of users. I don't believe such software exists. (And, to be clear, I'm writing from direct, day-job experience.) EDIT: I take it back. SQLite, cURL. Maybe. EDIT2: I can't reply to the SEL4 response, so here goes. I'm a huge fan of verification tools, but consider the Spectre class of bugs. Verification is always done wrt a mathemat…

seL4 is a formally verified OS kernel. https://sel4.systems/About/

Re: A world where people pay for software

#169

Post by paulddraper »

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…

That's true, but at the point that you have to fire up a VM to use some software... That's pretty niche

Re: A world where people pay for software

#170

Post by shon »

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…

Software margins are good, especially compared to physical things. However, the marginal cost is far from zero. It scales with # and variety of users. Today, all software comes with complex dependencies.

Take for example any mobile app. Apps require constant upgrades to keep up with the hardware and software changes on the platforms. You can’t just build an iPhone app and leave it alone to be enjoyed by people. I’ve tried, within a year or two there will be changes that require developer work, if you don’t keep it maintained, it will start to crash and function poorly, Apple, for example, tracks everything and will start with de-boosting search results for your app and end with removing it from the platform entirely.

Google is the same. I’ve tried, I built a Top 25 RPG and got busy with other things. It went from Top 25 to deplatformed in less 5 years because unmaintained software just doesn’t work in most cases today.

Software is more complex now. All software is a conglomeration of lots of other software: frameworks, platform tools, libraries, APIs, etc.

Another example: Flash

Another example: All the AI software being written on top of the OpenAI API will be broken in a year or two as they roll new versions of the API and deprecate the old.

Software doesn’t just work anymore. The platform that executes it is constantly changing.

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