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A world where people pay for software

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#171

Post by tiltowait »

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…

Paying for one month every once in a while for software that would otherwise be very expensive is about the only benefit I can see for subscriptions. For instance, Apple seems to be moving Final Cut Pro to a subscription model, and a $5/mo subscription is pretty great if you just need to use it once or twice or very sporadically.

Subscriptions always feel a little scummy to me, due in part to the way they're often advertised. I think that "Only $5/mo!" followed by tiny print saying "Billed annually" should be illegal, because it's clearly deceptive advertising.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#172

Post by robalni »

CBarkleyU wrote: post #139
robalni wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that is a possible problem. Partially, that problem exists with everything; advertisements make people buy from the most popular brands even if they are not the best. Other than that, the developers in this cooperation have to trust each other so if someone is just popular and doesn't make any good software, they would not be accepted by the other developers to join.

>doesn't make any good software What if the person does make decent software, but is a huge influencer? Why not opt for the Spotify model? Usage = money. Why turn this into a popularity contest?

> What if the person does make decent software, but is a huge influencer?

Then they would probably be able to make more money selling subscriptions than other developers that are less known. I don't know how different that would be though from if they sold physical products. One important thing here is that there is a limit to how many subscriptions one developer can sell. This is done to emulate physical products as much as possible.

Also, they would probably sell the subscriptions for a higher price than other developers, since they can, which would mean that people who don't know about that person would buy from someone who is cheaper.

> Why not opt for the Spotify model? Usage = money. Why turn this into a popularity contest?

That means there has to be usage statistics collection in all software. Since the software has to be open source, that could be abused a lot, including removed. I also don't like the idea of having any requirement like that on the software. It would for example require that the software has access to the internet which doesn't work well for some software.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#173

Post by nemo »

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.

>I find it mindboggling that a simple program like text processors have to be continually updated for decades

Your assumption that a word processor is a simple program is something you might want to consider, at a low level handling text rendering in a word processor is highly complex work. Besides text encodings regularly evolving and changing over the years especially in the pre-UTF-8 world (but even with Unicode), there's also the reality that security threats evolve over time, and once threats are discovered old code that once seemed fine becomes insecure and dangerous. In computing the reality is that there's constant change driven by supporting a regularly changing computing environment, security fixes, bug fixes, increased computing power permitting new features that are then implemented and new ideas appearing, et al. Software will always be changing, that's the way things are, there's good reasons for this. Trying to oppose that reality with an unrealistic model that doesn't account for the causes of change just leaves you misunderstanding the way the industry works.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#174

Post by sharemywin »

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…

This completely ignores the cost of support.

- How does this feature work?

- How does the software do this?

- you said it does this and it doesn't why?

- can make the software do this?

Each one of these questions cost money to answer and needs someone to hand hold the user. especially if they are a non-technical business user.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#175

Post by ryandrake »

mrlemke wrote: post #166
ryandrake wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Companies can bake the cost of one or two maintenance releases and maybe one or two years of security releases into the purchase price. I agree it's not reasonable to expect lifetime updates from a one-time purchase. As long as you're not doing heavy development on these maintenance releases, the company's cost should be very small.

As a user-developer, I'd also be happy with being provided the source (or un-linked object files, or the equivalent for whatever language being used) after the maintenance period was over, so I could continue applying dependency security patches myself.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#176

Post by cscheid »

ysavir wrote: post #159
cscheid wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software has no marginal cost. Maybe you've never experienced the difference between writing software for 1000 people and writing software for 1M people, or (I imagine) 1B. The marginal per-person cost of software is not on shipping. It's on "what kind of weird shit will I now have to do because 1M is a lot of chances for my software to break weirdly, and people have paid for it" > You don't have to worry about qua…

That's applicable to websites, where you have to handle requests from all your users, and more users means more requests to handle. But if we're talking about plain old regular software, something that needs no server to operate, and functions perfectly fine offline, something like, say, Photoshop, how different is the impact on the manufacturer when the software is used by 1k users, 1M users, and 1B users? Yes, havi…

> how different is the impact on the manufacturer when the software is used by 1k users, 1M users, and 1B users?

_very different_, when the user's environment is different. And 1) you haven't seen shit if you think you can perfectly control the user's environment. 2) every new user is a chance for the environment to bite you.

> Do they make the product unprofitable or unsuccessful in anyway?

You do your engineer best to try and fight that. But there's absolutely a marginal cost, which is what I was responding to.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#177

Post by ndriscoll »

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…

Even the security updates are often dubious. Software that could be entirely local (with a system provided filesystem backup/sync for data) adds "cloud" functionality so that it can lock you into the SaaS subscription model, and now it's got the network as an attack surface. It's self-justifying. Even there though, it generally just talks to the vendor's servers, and if you control the vendor's servers, you probably have more direct attack routes than some http client bug or some bug in an svg library that the vendor uses for their logo.

"Security" patches are something only checklist-driven corporate IT (i.e. people who can't consider use-case) ought to care about. For individuals, they're mostly a cudgel to justify abusive practices and should be ignored.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#178

Post by sanderjd »

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…

So, this is true:

> Too much software changes just to change.

But it doesn't imply this:

> I'd say at the very most it needs security updates.

What the parent said about "security updates at the very least" is correct, and sometimes that happens to also be the very most updates that should be made. And sometimes it's that but a little bit more. And sometimes it's that and a lot more.

The hard part is figuring out the right balance. And then, figuring out how to staff in order to achieve that balance.

The "only security updates" approach turns out to be among the hardest to figure out how to staff for. Because the idea is that this software is essentially complete upon release, so the natural business model is to sell it that way, for a one-time fixed price. And then with that revenue structure, the natural cost structure is to move all the staffing to a new project (or to build these kinds of products with project-based contracts to begin with).

But once you've accepted that you should at least be doing updates for security (and I think this is correct in almost all cases), well, now who is going to do those? You have a recurring cost with a non-recurring revenue stream. You can push down the recurring costs as far as possible, but eventually this model just struggles to pencil out. At that point, you'll probably decide to just stop all updates, including security patches.

This phenomenon is why most people making software seek a business model with a recurring revenue stream. It's not an accident that the days of boxed software were also the days of rampant insecurity.

But, you're totally right that the next step in this is often, "well if we have to have ongoing staffing and recurring revenue, we need something for them to do besides maintenance, so let's do UI refreshes and metrics and stuff I guess". It's a test of leadership, to avoid that temptation. Better products have better leadership that is making better decisions about when it makes sense to do more on a product and when it makes sense to mostly leave it be.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#179

Post by chromoblob »

steveBK123 wrote: post #164
grishka wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

> this is not correct at all

Why?

There's a thing called formal verification of software.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#180

Post by david422 »

shon wrote: post #170
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…

> 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

My favorite is when a new Apple update breaks your app, so you identify where the issue is and make a small update, but now Apple rejects your update because of some other arbitrary guidelines it's changed, so you then have to start down that rabbit hole.

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